AI & E-Commerce Glossary
Key terms and concepts for understanding AI shopping agents, structured data, and e-commerce optimization.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
The practice of optimizing content so that AI-powered answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) can read, understand, and recommend your products or pages. AEO extends traditional SEO by focusing on machine-readable structured data rather than just keywords.
Agent Ready
A MerchantStamp certification awarded to e-commerce stores that score 40 or above on the AI Readiness Score. Agent Ready stores meet the baseline standards for AI shopping agent optimization, meaning AI assistants can reliably read and recommend their products.
Aggregate Rating
A Schema.org property that summarizes customer reviews for a product (average rating, number of reviews). Including aggregate ratings in your structured data gives AI agents a trust signal and significantly increases the chances of your product being recommended over competitors.
AI Readiness Score
A 0-100 score calculated by MerchantStamp that measures how well an e-commerce store can be read and understood by AI shopping agents. The score evaluates 11 checks across structured data, product feeds, policies accessibility, and technical configuration.
AI Shopping Agent
An AI-powered assistant that helps consumers find, compare, and purchase products by crawling e-commerce sites and reading structured data. Examples include ChatGPT Shopping, Perplexity Shopping, Google AI Overviews, and emerging agents from Claude and Microsoft Copilot.
AI Visibility
The degree to which your e-commerce store and products are discoverable, readable, and recommendable by AI shopping agents. High AI visibility means agents can access your pages, parse your structured data, and confidently recommend your products to consumers.
Canonical URL
The preferred URL for a page when multiple URLs point to the same content (e.g., with/without www, HTTP/HTTPS, query parameters). Setting a correct canonical URL prevents AI agents from seeing duplicate products and diluting your store's authority.
Crawlability
The ability of bots and AI agents to access and navigate your website's pages. Good crawlability means fast response times, no blocked paths in robots.txt, proper sitemaps, and server-side rendered content (not hidden behind JavaScript that bots can't execute).
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
A subset of AEO specifically targeting generative AI systems. GEO focuses on making content citable and retrievable by large language models that generate responses from multiple sources, ensuring your store appears in AI-generated shopping recommendations.
Google Merchant Center
Google's platform for uploading and managing product feeds. Products submitted to GMC appear in Google Shopping, Google AI Overviews, and increasingly in third-party AI agents that leverage Google's product graph. A correctly configured GMC feed is one of the strongest signals for AI visibility.
GTIN (Global Trade Item Number)
A globally unique product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN) that allows AI agents and search engines to match your products with their global catalog. Including GTINs in your structured data dramatically improves product discoverability and trust signals for AI shopping recommendations.
JSON-LD
JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data — the recommended format by Google for embedding structured data in web pages. JSON-LD scripts are placed in the HTML <head> or <body> and describe entities (products, organizations, reviews) in a way machines can parse without reading the visible page content.
LLM (Large Language Model)
An AI model trained on vast amounts of text data that can understand and generate human language. LLMs like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini power the AI shopping agents that read and interpret e-commerce product data to make purchase recommendations.
llms.txt
An emerging standard (similar to robots.txt) that provides large language models with a plain-text summary of a website's purpose, structure, and key pages. Placing an llms.txt file at your domain root helps AI agents quickly understand what your store offers without crawling every page.
merchantstamp.json
A JSON manifest file placed at the root of an e-commerce site that declares AI agent policies (which bots are allowed, data usage permissions, contact info). It acts as a machine-readable handshake between merchants and AI agents, complementing robots.txt with richer permission metadata.
Open Graph (OG Tags)
A protocol created by Facebook that uses meta tags to control how URLs appear when shared on social media and messaging platforms. AI agents also use OG tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) as a fallback data source when structured data is missing, making them an easy first step for AI readiness.
Product Feed
A structured file (XML, CSV, or JSON) containing your entire product catalog with standardized attributes (title, price, availability, images, GTINs). Product feeds are submitted to platforms like Google Merchant Center and are increasingly consumed by AI shopping agents to index products.
Product Schema
The Schema.org/Product type used to describe a product on a web page. A complete product schema includes name, description, image, SKU, GTIN, price, currency, availability, brand, and aggregate ratings — all the data an AI shopping agent needs to recommend your product.
Rich Results
Enhanced search results that display additional information (star ratings, price, availability, images) directly in Google search. Rich results are powered by structured data and serve as a visual proxy: if your product shows rich results, it's likely also readable by AI shopping agents.
robots.txt
A text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which pages they may or may not access. For AI readiness, robots.txt must explicitly allow AI agent crawlers (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) to access product pages. Blocking these bots makes your store invisible to AI shopping agents.
Schema.org
A collaborative vocabulary maintained by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex that defines types and properties for structured data. Schema.org provides the "language" (Product, Offer, Review, etc.) that JSON-LD uses to describe web content to machines.
SSR (Server-Side Rendering)
A technique where web pages are rendered on the server before being sent to the client. SSR is critical for AI readiness because most AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot) cannot execute JavaScript — if your product data only appears after client-side rendering, AI agents will see an empty page.
Structured Data
A standardized format (typically JSON-LD using Schema.org vocabulary) for annotating web page content so that search engines and AI agents can understand the meaning behind it. For e-commerce, structured data describes products, prices, availability, reviews, and more in a machine-readable way.
XML Sitemap
An XML file listing all the pages on your website that you want search engines and AI agents to discover. For e-commerce, the sitemap should include all product pages, category pages, and policy pages with their last modification dates and update frequencies.