I recently joined Claus Lauter on the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast to answer one of the most common questions I hear from Shopify brands: why isn’t my store performing the way it should?
Most brands don’t have a traffic problem. They have a systems problem.
Growth Hides the Leak – Until It Doesn’t
When brands scale fast, the instinct is to add more: more ad spend, more apps, more partners, but complexity without a unified system compounds inefficiency, not growth.
I’ve seen brands at $20–30M that are completely stuck because they’ve tried everything in silos. A paid media agency here, a CRO partner there, a dev shop somewhere else. There is no shared data, no shared KPIs. Meanwhile, CAC is climbing, conversion is flat, and they’re over-indexed on one or two channels, getting more expensive by the day.
That’s the leak, and adding more won’t fix it.
The Surface Area Just Expanded
What makes this moment urgent is that the competitive landscape has shifted.
A potential customer today might first encounter your brand through a ChatGPT recommendation, a Gemini shopping result, or a Forbes buying guide cited by an AI engine. By the time they reach your Shopify store, the decision is already mostly made by an algorithm you never optimized for.
This is agentic commerce. AI agents are shopping on behalf of consumers, surfacing products, and making recommendations before any human visits your site. Think of it as your customer’s best friend shopping for them. And that friend is ChatGPT.
If your brand isn’t structured to win at that level, you’re losing revenue you didn’t know was available.
PR Is Now a Performance Channel
AI search engines pull recommendations from Forbes, Wirecutter, Reddit, and industry publications. If your brand isn’t showing up there, you’re invisible to the agents making buying decisions for your customers.
This is the foundation of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), otherwise known as AI Search Optimization (AIO). It runs on three pillars: technical optimization (structured product data LLMs can parse), owned content optimization (FAQs and PDPs that answer what agents actually ask), and high-impact PR that gives AI engines the third-party authority to recommend you. You need all three.
The Fix: Do Less, Better
The brands I’m most bullish on right now run a hub and spoke model with a lean core team focused on product and ops, supported by one strategic partner owning the full acquisition and retention stack. That’s what we built at Avenue Z after acquiring Varfaj: design, dev, performance media, PR, and AEO as one coordinated system.
Fragmented partners create fragmented results. That’s the leak that no amount of ad spend can patch.
Start Here
Search your product category in ChatGPT or Gemini right now. Use a real customer prompt – “What’s the best protein bar?” or “Top supplements for energy?” – and see who comes up.
If it’s not you, that’s your starting point.
Then, connect with our team at Avenue Z to identify your biggest conversion and AI visibility gaps. The window to get ahead of this is open. It won’t stay that way.
Listen to the full conversation on the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast, Episode #477.
The AI-First Agency
Win AI search, grow revenue and build reputation through PR and digital marketing.
