Megantic’s New Whitepaper, in Partnership with Shopify APAC, Identifies Why the Shift to Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the Most Urgent Digital Priority of 2026

AI-powered search has arrived and is here to stay, yet some are ignoring the urgent need to act quickly. ChatGPT garnered 1 million users within the initial five days of its release. And as AI platforms continue to pop up and become available, we continue to see significant worldwide engagement. Anthropic’s Claude is also having a moment and has positioned itself as a notable challenger to the ChatGPT marketplace, with download figures surging 240% in the US in the last month.

A critical blind spot is emerging across the Australian eCommerce space. Traffic may look stable, and rankings may appear unchanged. But behind the scenes, AI systems are already deciding which brands to surface, recommend, and trust. Yet most eCommerce sites aren’t built to be understood by them.

In response to this, Megantic’s new whitepaper in partnership with Shopify APAC, identifies why the shift to Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the most urgent digital priority of 2026, and what specifically eCommerce brands can do before they’re left out of the conversation entirely.

The element you’re overlooking

Traditional SEO gets brands in front of human eyes. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), the emerging discipline of structuring your digital presence to be interpreted and cited by AI, gets brands into the conversation before a shopper ever visits your site.

Shopify found that 64% of shoppers are likely to use AI to some extent when making purchases, with the fastest-growing behaviour being research-to-purchase without ever visiting a retailer’s website.

Yet the majority of eCommerce brands have no AEO strategy whatsoever. What we’ve found: eCommerce sites may be visible to humans and completely invisible to the AI systems now driving purchase decisions.

The scale of this shift is already clear. In January 2026, chatgpt.com received 5.5B visits with the average session lasting 13:08 minutes.

Jeremy Hanger, Megantic’s General Manager, has issued a warning about the “shockwaves across the eCommerce landscape.” He states that as Australians increasingly find brands through AI-powered experiences, “the brands that move early on AEO will have a significant competitive advantage.”

Why it matters now?

Shopify is already moving. In early 2026, the platform announced Agentic Storefronts. This infrastructure allows AI agents to “talk” directly to merchant backends, syndicate products across AI channels, and complete transactions without a human having to visit the store.

“We’re making every Shopify store agent-ready by default,” said Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke.

The brands that have invested in clean product data, structured site architecture, and machine-readable content are already being cited. And the brands that haven’t are already being skipped.

As Rhys Furner, Director of Partnerships at Shopify APAC, puts it: “Search is becoming a conversation, and commerce is becoming agentic. In 2026, visibility is less about being the loudest—and more about being the easiest for machines to understand and trust: clean productdata, clear policies, accurate inventory, and a checkout that can execute reliably wherever intent shows up.”

Gemini’s breakout growth in 2026 and Claude’s growing popularity in recent months.

Claude leads this shift with an average growth of +30.7%, including multiple triple-digit spikes, while Gemini (+12.8%) is emerging as a consistent secondary growth engine. Even ChatGPT, despite short-term volatility, remains net positive. However, percentage growth alone does not reflect scale.

In absolute terms, Google still dominates by a significant margin, driving ~413.7M visits in March 2026 compared to just ~3.2M from all AI sources combined. This reinforces that while AI is growing faster, Google remains the primary driver of traffic today. The opportunity is not a replacement but an expansion, with brands needing to capture both scale in search and growth in answer engines.

Screenshot above: Month-over-Month growth comparison percentage change in visitors, by Ahrefs.

AI-Powered Search is growing, and with it, agentic shopping grows

AI-powered search is no longer a future trend but a present reality, demanding immediate action from brands.

Significant expansion in the Australian tech landscape is underway, highlighted by OpenAI and Anthropic. Announcing plans to establish their first local presence in Sydney as their chosen AI tech hub.

As the Australian retail market awaits potential revenue surges from agentic commerce, brands are aggressively competing to have their content trusted and selected by Large Language Models (LLMs). Simultaneously, users will be evaluating which platforms offer the most personalised and accurate understanding of their needs.

What you can do as a Retailer

The foundation of AEO involves having a well-structured site architecture, accurate product data, logical category hierarchies, and authoritative content, all of which remain core. But deploying them with AI interpretation in mind requires a meaningfully different approach. The brands gaining ground now are those treating their underlying data as a storefront in itself.

Megantic’s whitepaper outlines the specific technical and strategic steps eCommerce leaders can take to build visibility in AI-generated search environments.

For eCommerce brands that may be swayed by marketing agencies offering a silver bullet, no agency can guarantee a citation in ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. But waiting guarantees you won’t get one.

We’ll leave you with this, Mark Baartse, Fractional CMO and Digital Marketing Consultant, who has worked with top brands including Showpo, LexisNexis and Microsoft, has some advice for eCommerce brands trying to pave their intermediate shopping journey: “Your underlying data is your new storefront. We must move beyond simple keywords, combining a deep understanding of customer intent with rich, machine-readable data to marry the disparate needs of these two unique audiences.”

About Megantic

Megantic is an award-winning Search & AI SEO agency, and the only specialist agency in Australia dedicated exclusively to eCommerce. Headquartered in Melbourne, with offices in the UK, Canada and Macedonia, Megantic has delivered over 1,000 SEO projects across 15 years, serving brands including Aquila, Milligram, The House of Golf, Gregory Jewellers and Muscle Nation. Winner of Best eCommerce Agency of the Year and Best Agency Culture at the Global Agency Awards.