Found by AI: Why Your Shopify Traffic is Dropping, and Where It Went

I’ve been in the ecommerce game a long time. Long enough to remember when "SEO" meant stuffing the keyword "luxury socks" into your footer 500 times in white text.

(Don’t act like you didn’t do it.)

But lately, I’ve been hearing the same panic from merchants everywhere: "Jay, my traffic is down. SEO is dead."

I’ve got news for you. Traffic didn't die. It just found a better driver.

Customers—especially the younger ones—are cheating on Google. They are sliding into ChatGPT’s DMs to ask for product recommendations. In fact, 7 out of 10 Gen Z shoppers are now using AI to buy online.

I recently sat down with Nihar Kulkarni, Managing Partner at Roswell NYC, to talk about this massive shift. Nihar isn't just guessing; his agency is a Shopify Platinum Partner (a status held by less than 1% of partners globally) and works with over 70 of the biggest Plus brands.

If you want to survive the "AI takeover," you need to stop optimizing for 2016 and start optimizing for today. Here are the biggest takeaways from our chat.

1. Stop Paying for Hands, Start Paying for Brains

We are entering a weird time where AI can write your product descriptions, code your landing pages, and generate your ad creative. If you are hiring an agency (or an employee) purely for "execution," you are burning money.

Nihar put it perfectly: "We’re billing for our brains, not for our hands anymore".

In the next two years, the cost of "doing the work" is going to zero. The value is now in the strategy. If your team is just "doing tasks" without a holistic plan, you are already behind.

2. Silos Are Killing Your Conversion Rate

Speaking of strategy, are your email team and your ads team talking to each other? Or do they live in separate Slack channels, ignoring each other's existence?

Nihar dropped a stat that blew my mind: Brands that integrate creative, engineering, and media see up to a 20% lift in conversion rates compared to siloed teams.

If your ads team is driving traffic to a landing page that your dev team hasn't optimized for speed, and your email team isn't retargeting those bounces, you are pouring water into a sieve.

3. AEO is the New SEO (And You Need an "LLMs.txt" File)

This is the most technical, actionable tip from the episode, so listen up.

We are moving from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).

When someone asks ChatGPT, "What are the best winter gloves?" you want to be the answer. But AI bots don't crawl websites the same way Google does. They crave structured, text-heavy data.

The Fix: You need an llms.txt file on your site.

Think of llms.txt as a sitemap for robots. It’s a simple text file that tells AI agents exactly what your site is about and where your important content lives. It’s the "VIP pass" for AI bots to understand your brand without getting distracted by your fancy CSS and pop-ups.

Why does this matter? Orders that come through AI search have a 30% higher Average Order Value (AOV) than traditional channels.

4. The "Black Friday Suppression" Rule

We are approaching the holidays (or maybe you are reading this in July and panicking early), and Nihar shared a retention mistake that makes me want to scream.

If a customer buys from you on Black Friday at 10 AM, stop emailing them sale offers at 2 PM.

It sounds obvious, but so many brands fail to suppress recent purchasers from their broadcast lists. Nothing makes a customer hate you more than seeing a "50% OFF" email for the item they just bought for 20% off.

The Benchmark: Your retention strategy (Email & SMS) should be driving 30% of your total revenue. If you are sitting at 10% or 15%, you are leaving massive profit on the table.

5. Final Thought: Be the "New Utility"

AI isn't a fad. It's the new utility, like electricity or the internet itself.

The brands that win in 2026 won't be the ones with the prettiest logos. They will be the ones that AI agents trust enough to recommend.

Get your llms.txt file up. Break down your silos. And for the love of commerce, stop emailing people who just bought from you!

Jay Myers is the co-founder of Bold Commerce and host of Shopify 1%. For more tips on scaling your store, subscribe to the show.