AEO & GEO

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) are the practices of making a site legible to the AI surfaces that increasingly mediate commerce — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the long tail of agent-driven shopping. Where classical SEO optimizes for crawlers that build a search index, AEO/GEO optimizes for models that read a page once and synthesize an answer. The legibility bar is higher: noisy markup, hydration-only data, and content trapped behind interaction all degrade an LLM's ability to recover the underlying facts.

The template ships with several built-in surfaces that contribute to AEO/GEO. The largest of them is content negotiation — serving structured markdown to clients that ask for it — but the supporting cast (JSON-LD schema, sitemaps, OpenGraph metadata) is what makes a page consistently parseable across surfaces.

Surfaces in the template

Surface	What it does	Key files
Content negotiation	Serves clean markdown to AI clients via `Accept: text/markdown`	`next.config.ts`, `app/md/`, `lib/markdown/`
Schema.org JSON-LD	Embeds structured `Product`, `BreadcrumbList`, and `Organization` data	`components/product-detail/schema.tsx`, `components/schema/**`
Sitemap	Enumerates products, collections, and pages for crawlers	`app/sitemap.ts`, `lib/shopify/operations/sitemap.ts`
Robots	Declares crawl policy, including allowances for known AI user agents	`app/robots.ts`
OpenGraph & Twitter metadata	Provides title, description, and image previews per route	`lib/seo.ts`, route-level `generateMetadata`

The rest of this page goes deep on content negotiation. The other surfaces are documented inline in the linked files.

Content Negotiation

Product, collection, and search pages serve structured markdown when clients send Accept: text/markdown. Browsers continue to receive HTML; AI agents and crawlers get clean, parseable markdown from the same URL.

This is built in and requires no configuration. Every markdown route lives under a single top-level app/md/ directory so all content-negotiation handlers are co-located and easy to find.

How it works

GET /products/speaker        (Accept: text/markdown)
GET /collections/speakers    (Accept: text/markdown)
GET /search?q=speaker        (Accept: text/markdown)
    ↓
next.config.ts rewrite
    ↓
/md/products/[handle]
/md/collections/[handle]
/md/search
    ↓
Route handler response: text/markdown

Browsers that don't send Accept: text/markdown are unaffected — the rewrite only fires when the header matches.

Testing

bash

# Returns structured markdown
curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" http://localhost:3000/products/speaker

# Returns collection markdown with products, filters, and pagination
curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" http://localhost:3000/collections/speakers

# Returns search markdown with query, filters, and result summaries
curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" "http://localhost:3000/search?q=speaker&sort=price-low-to-high"

# Returns the normal HTML page
curl http://localhost:3000/products/speaker

The Vary: Accept header ensures CDNs cache markdown and HTML responses separately.

What's included in the markdown

Product pages — handle, brand, category, pricing, options, variants, specs, images, tags, and SEO metadata
Collection pages — collection metadata, description, applied filters, available filters, products, pagination, image, and SEO metadata
Search pages — query metadata, active collection filter, applied filters, available filters, products, and pagination state

Key files

File	Purpose
`next.config.ts`	Rewrite rules matching `Accept: text/markdown`
`app/md/products/[handle]/route.ts`	Product markdown route handler
`app/md/collections/[handle]/route.ts`	Collection markdown route handler
`app/md/search/route.ts`	Search markdown route handler
`lib/markdown/product.ts`	`productToMarkdown()` converter
`lib/markdown/collection.ts`	`collectionToMarkdown()` converter
`lib/markdown/search.ts`	`searchResultsToMarkdown()` converter
`lib/markdown/catalog.ts`	Shared product/filter/pagination formatting helpers
`lib/markdown/utils.ts`	Formatting helpers (prices, tables, escaping)

Multi-locale

If you have enabled Shopify Markets, the rewrite fires before locale routing — no additional configuration is needed. Pass a ?locale= query parameter to the markdown endpoint for locale-specific pricing and collection/search context.