SEO, GEO & AI-Engine Optimisation

Control how Google, social platforms, and AI assistants see, display, and describe your store.

Every month, millions of people search for products on Google without ever seeing an ad. If your store's pages don't appear in those results, you're invisible to them — and you can't pay your way into every search. The SEO & GEO screen gives you one place to control how Google sees your store, how your links look on social media, and — increasingly — how AI assistants describe your brand when someone asks them for a recommendation.

Go to Marketing → SEO & GEO (labelled just SEO in the new admin sidebar).

Why this matters

Channel	What controls your visibility	What happens without it
Google Search	Page title, description, sitemap, indexing rules	You rank on page 5 — or not at all
Social shares	Social card image, title, description	Links to your store look blank or broken on WhatsApp and Instagram
Rich results	Structured data (Organisation, Local Business, Website)	Competitors with star ratings and hours appear above you in search
Local / regional buyers	Geo targeting by country, state, or city	Search engines can't tell your store is relevant to nearby shoppers
AI assistants	AI crawler opt-in, brand description, FAQ answers	ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity describe competitors when someone asks for a recommendation in your category

A live SEO Health Score at the top of the screen grades your current setup out of 100 across eight checks, and turns each failing check into a one-click Quick Win you can jump straight to.

Search basics (Meta)

Write the title and description that appear under your store name in a Google result:

Field	Guidance
Meta title	Up to 100 characters; Google typically displays 50–60 in full before truncating
Meta description	Up to 300 characters; Google typically displays 150–160 in full
Keywords	Up to 500 characters, comma-separated — used internally, not shown to shoppers

The screen shows a live character count against each recommended range as you type.

Whenever anyone posts a link to your store on WhatsApp, X, or Facebook, this card — not a blank box — appears as the preview. Upload one social image and write a short title and description for it; these are separate from your search meta title/description so you can tune each channel independently.

For X (Twitter) specifically, choose a Twitter Card type (a compact summary, or the larger summary-with-image), and optionally add your store's own @handle and the @handle of whoever should be credited as the content's creator — both help X attribute the card correctly.

Live previews

As you edit, a Live Previews panel shows a mock-up of a Google search result and your social share card, updating from the meta title/description and social image you've entered so far — no need to save first or open an incognito search to check your work. On wide screens it's a sticky column next to the form; on narrower screens, click View previews in the top bar to open it as a drawer instead.

Structured data

Tell Google what kind of business you are using one of three ready-made templates:

Organization
Local Business
Website

Applying a template fills in a JSON-LD structured-data block, which you can also hand-edit directly. Google uses this to power rich results — opening hours, address, and search actions shown directly in the results page, before anyone clicks through.

Indexing controls

Decide which pages Google is allowed to crawl (the robots directive), whether your sitemap is active (it should be — this is how Google discovers every product and category page automatically), and set a canonical URL to stop the same product appearing at two different addresses and splitting your ranking.

Your store address serves these to crawlers directly — https://<your-store>/robots.txt and https://<your-store>/sitemap.xml are real, always-on files, not just settings-screen previews. The sitemap lists your storefront home page, every product, every category, plus your About and Contact pages, and updates automatically as you add or remove products and categories — you never regenerate it by hand. Your store's llms.txt (see AI-Engine Optimisation below) is served the same way, at https://<your-store>/llms.txt.

These three files are served on both addresses a store can be reached at: your BillionBiz subdomain (yourstore.billionbiz.store) and, once it's connected, your custom domain — but see the canonical-domain rule below for exactly when the custom domain takes over.

Canonical URL must be one of your own domains

The Canonical URL field only accepts an address on a domain this store actually owns: your BillionBiz store address, or the address of your custom domain whose DNS points to BillionBiz once its status in Custom Domains is DNS Verified or Active. With the usual setup (a CNAME on www.) that is https://www.yourdomain.com, not the bare yourdomain.com, because the bare domain still points to your domain provider. Saving a new address anywhere else fails with:

Canonical URL must use one of this store's domains: <list>

— where <list> names your store's subdomain and the custom-domain address we serve. This stops a typo or a competitor's URL from accidentally being declared as the canonical source for your own pages, which would tell Google to rank the other site instead of yours.

Editing other SEO fields never trips this check. If a canonical URL was saved before this rule existed, saving the page again with that same value (for example after changing only the title) still succeeds. The check runs only when you type a different canonical URL.
Which address search engines see. Once your custom domain is DNS Verified or Active, your sitemap links, robots.txt sitemap line and each page's canonical link use the custom-domain address whose DNS points to BillionBiz (usually the www. one). Before that, or if neither the bare domain nor www. points to BillionBiz any more, they use your billionbiz.store subdomain.
Troubleshooting: "why was my canonical rejected?" Check the domain status in Custom Domains. A domain that is still pending DNS is not accepted yet; connect it, wait for DNS Verified, then save again. If only www. points to BillionBiz, the bare domain is rejected: use the www. address the error lists. Also check for a typo in the host name — only the exact domains in the error list are accepted.

Meta tags render in the page itself, not just after it loads

Your page title, description, canonical link, social preview tags, and structured data are written directly into the page's HTML — visible to search-engine crawlers and to link-preview generators (WhatsApp, Slack, iMessage, Facebook) that read the page once and don't run JavaScript. You don't need a "renders after load" workaround for any of this to be picked up correctly.

Offline stores are intentionally hidden from search

If your store is in maintenance mode (taken offline — see Maintenance Mode Page Editor), its pages are marked noindex on purpose: Google won't index a page your own customers can't currently reach. Bring the store back online to make it indexable again — you don't need to change anything on this SEO screen.

GEO targeting

Select the region (country/state, via a searchable list), a place name, and optionally precise latitude/longitude coordinates for your store. This signals to search engines that your results are most relevant to people in those locations — important if you trade locally (e.g. Tamil Nadu only) or ship internationally and want to capture buyers in specific markets.

AI-Engine Optimisation (AEO)

This is the newest frontier. When someone asks an AI assistant "what's the best eco-friendly clothing brand in India?", the assistant pulls from a web of sources to build its answer. The AEO panel lets you:

Opt in to AI crawler access — a toggle that permits GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and similar AI crawlers to index your store.
Write an organisation description — in your own words, used in structured data and in an llms.txt file AI engines can read.
Add "same as" URLs — canonical links to your profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikidata, and similar, so AI engines can cross-reference who you are.
Build an FAQ library — question/answer pairs that render as FAQ structured data and in llms.txt, teaching AI tools what you sell, your return policy, and your story.
Add Brand Q&A pairs — canonical prompt/response pairs that reduce the chance of an AI tool hallucinating facts about your brand.

Merchants who set this up now have a head start as AI-driven discovery grows.

SEO Health Score

The score at the top of the screen checks eight things: meta title present, title length in the ideal range, meta description present, description length in the ideal range, sitemap enabled, social image uploaded, canonical URL set, and indexing not blocked. Reaching 70+ turns the score green ("Strong"); below 40 is flagged "Needs work." Each failing check links straight to the section that fixes it.

Saving your changes

Edit any section, then click Save — a save bar appears at the bottom of the screen whenever you have unsaved changes, with a Discard option next to it if you want to back out.

Tab layout differs by admin skin

On the classic (v1) admin panel, Meta, Social, Structured Data, GEO targeting, AI-Engine Optimisation, Sitemap, and Robots are each their own tab. On the newer admin sidebar — where this screen is labelled just SEO — there are four tabs instead: Meta, Social, Sitemap, Robots. Structured data, GEO targeting, and AI-Engine Optimisation all live together inside the Meta tab there rather than as separate tabs, and the Twitter Card handles above live inside Social. Every field described on this page exists on both admin panels — only the tab layout differs.

SEO Health Score and Live Previews are classic-skin only

The SEO Health Score panel and the Live Previews panel described above (the Google-result and social-card mock-ups) are only available on the classic (v1) admin panel. The newer admin sidebar's SEO screen doesn't show either one — you can still fill in and save every field there, you just won't see the live score or the preview mock-ups while you do it.

Hosted sites

If you also run a site through the Hosting add-on, a scope selector at the top of this screen lets you switch between editing your storefront's SEO and a specific hosted site's SEO. See Analytics, SEO & Security for Your Site for the hosted-site version.

Troubleshooting: why doesn't Google show my new title yet?

You changed the Meta title on this screen, saved, and checked Google a day later — but the search result still shows the old title. This is almost always expected, not a bug:

Search engines re-crawl on their own schedule. Google doesn't re-read your pages the moment you save — a re-crawl can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, longer for pages that don't get much traffic. There's no "publish now to Google" button; this is normal.
Check your store isn't in maintenance mode. An offline store is deliberately marked noindex (see the callout above) — while it's offline, Google is being told not to index it at all, regardless of what this screen says. Bring the store back online first.
Confirm the crawler files actually load. Open https://<your store>/robots.txt and https://<your store>/sitemap.xml directly in a browser. Both should return content, not an error page. If either doesn't load, indexing can't proceed — check your custom domain's status is Active (not just DNS Verified) if you're using one, since the sitemap serves subdomain links until then.
Submit your sitemap directly. Add https://<your store>/sitemap.xml in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for the fastest way to prompt a re-crawl, rather than waiting for the crawler to find it on its own.
WhatsApp/Facebook cache old link previews separately from search. If a shared link still shows the old title/image on WhatsApp or Facebook, that's their own preview cache, not Google — use Facebook's Sharing Debugger to force it to re-fetch. It has nothing to do with your Google ranking or your SEO Health Score.

Next steps

Coupons — pair strong search visibility with a discount to convert new visitors.
Marketing Programs (Roadmap) — what's coming next for growth beyond SEO and coupons.