Selling Sunglasses: What Generative AI Means to Your SEO

The Olympic Eyewear blog features posts discussing SEO from time to time. With changes in the AI space, we felt it necessary to discuss generative AI content and its impact on SEO for ecommerce operators. If you sell designer sunglasses exclusively online, we have some information you need to know.
We make our bread and butter as a wholesale sunglasses distributor. All our sunglasses are sold through our ecommerce portal. So what you were about to read regarding generative AI and SEO applies to us too. We have been working hard to keep up with the changes to online search, changes brought about by generative AI.

All the Big Boys Are Doing It

The first organization to implement AI-search in earnest is a company known as Perplexity. Their search engine bears the same name. Perplexity was launched in 2022 as a company built on an AI chatbot. They combined the chatbot with their large language model (LLM) to create a search engine intended to compete with Google and Bing.
Perplexity isn't fooling around. They already have about 10 million monthly users and are awash in investment funding. Their success has driven Google and Bing to be more aggressive in developing their own generative AI search platforms. Google now has Gemini while Microsoft has its Copilot.

What It Means to You

All this is well and good, but what does it mean to you as an ecommerce operator? It means you now need to start adapting your SEO efforts to take advantage of AI-powered search. AI-powered search has a few key characteristics:

• It answers questions in a conversational way.
• It provides answers rather than lists of websites.
• It relies heavily on longtail keywords for ranking.
• It prefers to use user-centric content.

AI-powered search is not designed to merely list a bunch of links users can click through to find what they want. Instead, it is designed to provide all the necessary information users want without them ever having to click a link. Links are still provided with answers just in case a consumer wants more information.
This suggests that your content needs to go above and beyond mere sales. It needs to answer important questions your customers might ask. It needs to provide information important enough for search engines to include it in their answers.

Think About Your Customers

As an ecommerce operator, the key to your success is making a connection with your customers. From an SEO standpoint, you need to think about your customers and the terms they would utilize in the search for new designer sunglasses. Bear in mind that your customers are unlikely to enter just one or two keywords. In fact, they are more likely to ask the search engine a question like, "Where can I find cheap aviator sunglasses?"
Create your content around answering questions, solving problems, and offering insights your customers might be interested in. Explain how to do something, like protecting that new pair of sunglasses from scratches. Do a deep dive into UV protection or explain how polarization works. If nothing else, know that content that performs well with AI-powered search is not fluff. It is meaty and relevant.
Don't be surprised if traditional Google and Bing searches disappear completely within the next year or two. As AI-powered search gets better, people are going to rely less on conventional searches. You are going to need to adapt your SEO practices if you want people to continue discovering your affordable designer sunglasses during their online searches.
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