By Steve Merrill, Founder of WRKNG Digital — June 28, 2026
The agencies that can genuinely prepare your Shopify store for agentic commerce do something most skip: they show you where you stand before asking for a contract. If a pitch deck shows up before an audit does, that's your answer.
Here's what separates agencies actually doing AEO work from ones that slapped "AI" on their old SEO retainer.
1. They Audit Before They Pitch
A real AEO agency runs your store through an AI visibility audit before quoting you anything. You should see your current score (which products are getting recommended by AI assistants, which aren't, and why) before signing anything. According to our own audit data from over 2,400 Shopify products, only 11% had the structured data required to surface in ChatGPT Shopping results.
2. They Understand Shopify Catalog and ChatGPT, Not Just Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Center is not the same as ChatGPT's Shopping Graph. The data requirements, feed formats, and product attribute standards are different. An agency that only builds for Google is leaving you invisible on the platforms your customers are increasingly using to discover products.
3. They Measure AI Citations, Not Just Search Rankings
Ranking on page one of Google doesn't tell you whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini recommend your products. Good agencies track AI citation rates using purpose-built tools like Otterly or Profound. If your agency only sends you a keyword ranking report, they're measuring the wrong thing.
4. They Deliver Schema and Feed Fixes, Not Just Content
Content alone doesn't make a Shopify store visible to AI shopping assistants. The work is technical: structured data markup, corrected product feeds, fixed attribute gaps, proper category taxonomy. Ask any prospective agency what their deliverables look like. If it's mostly blog posts, that's not AEO.
5. They Set Up llms.txt and AI Crawlability Signals as Standard Practice
The llms.txt standard gives AI models a structured way to understand your site's content and permissions. A serious AEO agency treats this as table-stakes — not a bolt-on. They also check that major AI crawlers aren't blocked in your robots.txt, which is more common than you'd think.
6. They Offer Month-to-Month Contracts
The protocols, tools, and platform integrations in this space are shifting every few months. ChatGPT Shopping launched at scale in 2025. Perplexity's shopping features are still evolving. Shopify's agentic commerce rollout is ongoing. Locking yourself into a 12-month contract right now, before the dust settles, is a bad bet. Any agency confident in their work should be fine with shorter commitments.
7. They Can Show You Before/After AI Recommendation Data from Real Shopify Stores
Results aren't hypothetical. Ask to see anonymized before/after data from actual client stores: AI citation rates before the engagement, and after. If an agency can't produce that, they either haven't done the work or don't know how to measure it. Either way, it's a problem.
How We Chose This List
This list comes from six months of building AI audit tools for Shopify stores and running those audits across hundreds of real merchants. We've also reviewed proposals from a range of agencies pitching AEO services to ecommerce brands and tracked what the ones getting results actually do differently.
We're not ranking agencies or naming names. This is a framework for your own evaluation. Use these seven points as a checklist when you're talking to anyone who claims they can improve your AI visibility.
One resource worth reviewing independently: Schema.org's Product markup documentation is a good baseline for understanding what structured data AI systems expect from product pages.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between an SEO agency and an AEO agency?
SEO agencies are built around search engine crawlers and ranking algorithms. AEO agencies are built around how AI models read, interpret, and cite your store. The technical work is different. The measurement is different. Some SEO agencies are making the shift. Most aren't there yet.
How do I know if an agency actually understands Shopify's agentic commerce setup?
Ask them to explain how Shopify's product catalog connects to ChatGPT Shopping. Ask what feed attributes matter most for AI recommendation eligibility. If they can't answer those questions specifically, they're still thinking in Google terms.
Do I need an agency, or can I do this myself?
Some of it you can do yourself, especially the llms.txt setup and basic schema checks. The feed corrections and citation tracking are harder without the right tools. If you're running a serious store, the technical depth usually justifies outside help. If you're just starting to explore this, an audit is a reasonable first step before committing to any agency relationship.
How fast should I expect to see AI citation results?
AI models re-crawl and update their training and retrieval data on different schedules. Some citation improvements show up in weeks. Others take longer depending on the platform. Any agency guaranteeing specific timelines is guessing. What they should be doing is measuring consistently so you can see the direction of movement over time.
What should the first deliverable from an AEO agency be?
An audit. Before anything else, you need a clear picture of where your store currently stands with AI systems: which products are visible, which are invisible, and what's causing the gaps. That's the baseline. Everything else builds from it.
See Where Your Store Stands
If you want to know how visible your Shopify store is to AI shopping assistants right now, that's where we start. No pitch deck first.