What Does Microsoft’s AEO/GEO Guide Mean for Ecommerce?

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What does Microsoft's AEO/GEO Guide mean for ecommerce? 

In this episode of Found in AI, Cassie walks through what Microsoft actually recommends for optimizing ecommerce sites for AI engines like Copilot, why structured and consistent product data matters, and how AI systems interpret pricing, availability, and trust signals.

Using Microsoft’s guidance alongside the Freshness, Structure, Authority (FSA) framework, Cassie explains what ecommerce teams should focus on now — and why page-level SEO alone is no longer enough.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What Microsoft’s AEO/GEO guide reveals about AI-driven ecommerce discovery
• Why AI optimization is about clarity and consistency, not rankings
• The schema types Microsoft recommends for ecommerce brands
• Which product data fields AI systems rely on most
• How the FSA framework applies to AEO and GEO strategies
• What ecommerce teams should audit first to improve AI visibility

If you’re an ecommerce marketer or founder trying to understand how AI engines actually interpret your site — and how to ensure your brand is represented accurately in AI-generated answers — this episode will help you rethink what optimization really means.

Resources:

Microsoft: From Discovery to Influence: A Guide to AEO and GEO

Let's connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Content Strategist
Website → cassieclarkmarketing.com

P.S. Is your brand losing its "Answer Authority"?

Most series A/B and enterprise brands are being "nudged" out of AI search results because of entity gaps and "stale" content. I am opening 3 specialized audit slots for February 2026 to help you reclaim your Share of Voice using the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority).

Request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

Transcript

0:16

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) All right, it is Thursday, and this is one of those quote news updates that isn't really breaking news because I'm recording this ahead of time. So if something absolutely bananas happens between the afternoon of Monday, February 2nd, and when this goes live on Thursday, February 5th, well, that's just future Cassie's problem. Welcome back. I'm Cassie Clark. I'm a fractional content strategist and AI search optimization expert, and this is Found in AI. It's a show dedicated to helping marketers and founders learn AI search and GEO strategies. Today's update focuses solely on Microsoft, and as much as I hate to use the word quietly, because if you know, you know, they legitimately quietly published a guide on AEO and GEO back in January. To me, this whole guide is Microsoft plainly saying that AI-driven discovery is here, and brands need to optimize for it. Let's take a look at what they said. Okay, before I get into what we're talking about today with Microsoft's AEO and GEO guide, fair warning, I am recording this on Monday, and if you listen to Tuesday's episode when I record a Tuesday's episode, you know I'm dealing with massive brain fog today, so some words are just not coming out right. Apologize in advance. Thanks for sticking around, but let's clear up something with this guide from Microsoft. I feel like I have to say it. This is not Microsoft saying that SEO is dead, or you need to go forget your website, but it is Microsoft saying something else. They really care about helping you create a SEO, GEO, AEO-focused strategy that makes it easier for an AI engine to understand your business. Microsoft spends a good chunk of this guide, and I'll link it in the show notes, walking through e-commerce specifically, and they actually give implementation guidance. They explicitly recommend schema types like product, offer, reviews, and aggregate ratings, brand, item list, FAQs. We talk about FAQs a lot. This is no longer nice to have, and according to Microsoft, you know, the brand that owns Copilot, this is how AI systems identify products, prices, and those trust signals that we also talk about quite a bit. So as we go through this episode, we're going to play a quick game of not this, but that. So this is not we have product pages, but we have machine-readable product entities. This is not our reviews look great visually, but our reviews are structured. This is not, well, Google can crawl our pages, but AI engines can extract and reconcile our information. So in the guide, Microsoft also calls out the specific data fields AI engines really care about. I'm just going to list them. They mention price, availability, SKU. I'm not in e-commerce, so I'm probably going to say it wrong. GTIN, GTIN. They also mention size, color, and date modified, and they stress consistency across your on-page content, your structured data, and your feeds. So next blitz round of not this, but that. Not the price is right on the page, but the price matches schema and feeds like those APIs. Not inventory updates eventually, but availability reflects reality in near real-time. Not, oh, we ran a promo, but the promo had explicit start and end dates that machines can read. AI engines do not do well with mismatch. We've talked about that a couple of times on the podcast. If there's a mismatch, they just interpret that as unreliable, and unreliable sources, they don't get cited. So remember the FSA framework, freshness, structure, and authority. Microsoft doesn't clearly name the framework in their guidance, but the logic is pretty much textbook FSA. So for freshness, e-commerce brands need accurate prices, availability, promos, updates, all that should be as close to real-time as possible. Structure, we need those relationships between products, offers, reviews, FAQs, and lists. And then authority, well, this is where those rating and review sites come in handy. Final round, not this, but that. Not, we publish a lot, but we maintain a trusted source of truth. So again, Microsoft didn't make a ton of noise as far as I saw about this guide when it dropped. And if I remember correctly, I mean, this was nearly a month ago. I don't really even remember seeing that many people talk about it on LinkedIn, but this is a true official definition of what AEO and GEO means from a company that offers an AI tool that we ought to care about optimizing for. The guide basically boils down to one single truth, and it's that your e-commerce site really should be an input layer for discovery, which brings me back to a past episode with Carl titled, If No One Clicks Anymore, What's a Website For? If that input layer is messy, outdated, or contradicts itself or your brand across the channels that you post on, those AI systems will either skip you or misrepresent you, and neither of those options are great. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, but what do I do? Well, here it is. Just going to list out the numbers. First, audit your product and offer schema. Second, validate your price and availability consistency. Three, use date modified intentionally. Four, structure your reviews and your ratings. And five, explicitly mark promotion windows. So we need to really stop assuming that AEO will figure it out, and we just need to help it figure it out. And if we trust Microsoft's opinion, I think it's pretty clear that AEO and GEO are not buzzwords anymore. Microsoft has officially moved them into the implementation phase. So if your strategy is still page first instead of entity first, consider this your sign to fix it. All right. So that's it for your Thursday update. If you need more resources on AI search visibility, head over to my website, kassiclarkmarketing.com. And if you are ready to start your AI search visibility audit, I can help with that too. I'll leave a link and more information in the show notes. Okay. Until next time, stay visible.