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Customers Searching for products to buy is changing and evolving at lightining speed. This article helps you Prepare for AI Commerce and covers 10 Things in AI Aboriginal Retail businesses Must Do Now in AI.
Your customers are no longer only typing keywords into search engines like Google or Safari — they are now also increasingly asking AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity voice assistants for direct recommendations on what to buy, where to shop and which products are “best”.
This shift is what many are calling AI Commerce — a new retail environment where AI systems act as discovery engines, shopping assistants and recommendation layers between consumers and brands.
For ecommerce businesses, this means traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) alone is no longer enough. Businesses now need to optimise for both search engines and AI systems. This search practice is increasingly referred to as GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) — ensuring your business can be understood, trusted and surfaced by AI chat tools.
So with that, here are the 10 Things in AI Aboriginal Retail businesses Must Do Now to become and remain visible in this new generation of online ecommerce.
AI tools rely heavily on structured and highly descriptive content to understand products.
Many ecommerce sites still use short descriptions from suppliers or minimal copy. This makes it difficult for AI systems to determine what a product is, who it is for, why it matters and when it should be recommended to a buyer. AI prefers content that directly answers user questions, so display copy that is conversational in nature that respondes to potential queries.
Strong product listings should include:
The more context your website provides, the more likely AI systems are to reference your products accurately. Equally, your website should create product category pages to cover generic queries on products to support AI to provide great useful answers.
AI engines favour and preference websites that demonstrate expertise and usefulness in relation to the conversation with AI.
As a retailers you should move beyond simply listing products and being factual as to features and start creating educational content such as:
For example, an Aboriginal-owned retailer selling skincare products could create articles about native botanicals, traditional ingredients or ethical sourcing. This helps AI systems understand the business niche and expertise of the brand.
The building of content depth through the content types above builds trust signals with AI that will help AI preference your site and improve both traditional SEO and AI discoverability.
While SEO focussed on ensuring the right ‘keywords’ were used in your product content. Consumers are now increasingly searching using conversational prompts like:
AI tools often answer these questions directly. Businesses should structure their product content around natural language and customer intent rather than isolated keywords.
Adding FAQ sections across product pages and blogs is one of the easiest ways to improve GEO performance.
AI systems favour websites that are fast, accessible and technically well-structured.
Key priorities for improving your website include:
Technical optimisation helps both search engines and AI crawlers interpret website content more accurately.
Schema markup is super important for AI commerce.
Structured data helps AI systems clearly identify:
Platforms like Google Search Central provide guidance on implementing schema markup. Otherwise you can get plugins or use a professional to develop the schema.
Without structured data, AI tools may misunderstand or ignore important information about your business. Schema helps AI to review your website and its updates more regularly providing better information to AI systems.
AI systems learn from a range of multiple sources — not just your own website.
So as a business owner you should focus on building consistent brand presence across the following channels:
The more external, credible references AI systems can find about your business across the internet, the stronger your digital brand authority becomes and the more AI will present your brand.
This is especially important for smaller, niche and independent retailers competing against larger brands.
Customer reviews through a credible third-party review platforms such as Trustpilot and other review opportunities are now very influential in AI-generated recommendations.
AI systems often analyse your reviews from customers to determine:
Encourage reviews on:
Importantly, reviews should be genuine and detailed. AI systems are becoming better at detecting spammy or low-quality review patterns. So make sure you ask for a review of products from your customers through your review platform and guide our customers on what to say so that AI can use their review effectively.
AI tools attempt to summarise brands quickly. If your business positioning is unclear, inconsistent or overly vague, or not different enough you may be overlooked.
Retailers should clearly communicate:
For First Nations retailers, this presents an opportunity to clearly articulate cultural connection, authenticity, community impact, credentials and ethical sourcing in ways that AI systems can recognise and surface appropriately.
Visual search and multimodal AI are growing rapidly. AI systems increasingly analyse product images directly, meaning image optimisation matters more than ever.
Businesses should:
For example, instead of naming an image “IMG_4422.jpg”, a better filename would be:
aboriginal-handmade-ceramic-mug-australia.jpg
This helps AI tools better understand visual content.
In the near future, consumers may increasingly ask AI assistants to:
Retailers that provide structured, trustworthy and easily accessible data will be better positioned for these AI-driven purchasing systems.
This means businesses should think beyond “ranking on Google” through keywords and start preparing for “being selected by AI”.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is still evolving, but one thing is clear: businesses that invest early in structured content, authority, authenticity and technical optimisation will have a major advantage.
Importantly, many of the fundamentals of SEO remain the same:
– create useful content, build trust, improve customer experience and communicate clearly.
The difference is that businesses are now optimising not only for humans on search engines — but also for AI systems that are increasingly shaping how consumers discover and purchase products online.
For ecomm retailers, the shift toward AI commerce is no longer a future trend. It has already started and we are playing catch up.
Interested in more member articles? See our article for members on retail discounting here
