Questions commerce teams ask about CEI.

It rhymes with SEO, but it is a different job. SEO and SEO tools optimize a page to rank in human search. CatalogSignal works one layer down, on whether an AI assistant can recommend your product and describe it correctly: it scores how machines read your catalog across structured attributes, differentiation, retrieval, claim integrity, and authority, every finding backed by product-level evidence, not opinion. It assumes you are already doing good SEO and picks up where that work stops.

The CEI is a 0 to 100 score that measures whether AI shopping systems can find, understand, trust, and recommend your products. It evaluates the catalog data layer across five pillars and 16 evidence-backed signals. Unlike an SEO audit or a PIM cleanup, every point in the score traces to specific product-level evidence, so the CEI is not just a number, it is a map of exactly what to fix to get recommended.

Comparable mode uses only the public view any AI agent can crawl, so scores are comparable across brands. Authorized mode adds the private feeds and APIs you already share with commerce partners, which makes more signals computable and the score more complete.

For a baseline, very little: your brand and a representative set of product pages. Authorized mode is optional but strongly encouraged, and only uses the private feeds and APIs you choose to share. It makes more signals computable and the score more complete. We will scope the right starting point with you.

A baseline CEI Diagnose typically takes about 10 to 14 business days. Activate work runs over a few weeks depending on scope, and Protect is an ongoing, per-product-page safeguard. CEI Publish then exposes your verified catalog as a structured surface AI assistants can read directly. And the baseline is never a generic report: you get a scored, evidence-backed view of exactly where AI can and cannot recommend your products, so you know what to fix first.

An executive scorecard with your readiness band and drivers, a technical evidence package with product-level findings, and a prioritized remediation roadmap mapped to owners and impact. Because every finding is tied to a specific product and an owner, you leave with an executable fix plan, not opinions, which is what separates a CEI assessment from a standard audit.

Your private data stays confidential and is used only to produce your own assessment. Benchmarking draws solely on the public view anyone can see, and every diagnostic is evidence-backed and inspectable.

Organizations whose products are increasingly discovered through AI shopping and answer agents, and the commerce, marketing, and data leaders accountable for whether those agents can find, trust, and recommend them. Today that is mostly retailers and consumer brands; the same readiness gap is emerging across more categories as AI-mediated discovery expands.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) gets your product pages to rank on Google. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) gets your content into AI Overviews and answer boxes at the top of the results. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is about being the product an assistant like ChatGPT recommends by name. They build on each other, and ranking is no longer the same as being recommended. CatalogSignal works the layer beneath all three: whether an AI can find, tell apart, trust, and confirm your specific products, SKU by SKU. That is what decides whether your SEO, AEO, and GEO effort ever turns into a recommendation, and it is what the Commerce Eligibility Index measures and fixes.

No. GEO usually means getting your brand mentioned where AI learns, through reviews, articles, and expert roundups. CatalogSignal works one layer deeper, on the catalog itself: it measures and fixes whether an AI can find, tell apart, trust, and recommend your specific products, SKU by SKU. GEO gets your brand talked about; CatalogSignal makes your products recommendable.

SEO is still your foundation, but it optimizes for ranking, not for being recommended. When a shopper asks an assistant what to buy, it does not return ten links, it names one or two products. If your catalog is not legible to that assistant, strong SEO alone will not put you on the shortlist.