I have a friend who works in B2B eCommerce specifically with some projects in D2C and they're saying that SEO is mostly a dead end now. It's all about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

So if someone is looking for a 18V cordless drill for drilling into concrete, they'll most likely ask an agent. If your site has bad AEO/GEO, the product pages are either impossible to read by an agent or the data is badly formatted -> the agent won't recommend your product, resulting in a lost sale.

Like SEO gave us OpenGraph and similar common tools to provide data in a machine readable form, AEO/GEO will force data to be readable by agents.

Some sites like Consumer Reports block all crawlers, so we'll see how that goes for them.