Interview with Katelyn Geary on organic shopping

Hi! I'm Katelyn Geary! I'm Senior SEO Strategist at Break The Web. I've been working in SEO for 10 years, including the last five helping multimillion-dollar ecommerce brands grow through technical SEO, content, website migrations, local SEO and more recently, AI search and agentic commerce. I've spent most of my career working in-house on large, complex websites, so I'm used to connecting SEO with the broader business and prioritizing the work that makes the biggest impact.

It was accidental, the way most SEO careers are! I fell into ecommerce early in my career at an agency, where I was doing SEO for retail clients before I really knew what I was doing. What keeps me here is how challenging and unforgiving ecommerce can be. The metrics are real revenue, not vanity metrics, and mistakes show up in dollars.

What actually turned me from someone "doing SEO" into someone who is an SEO was going technical and treating crawling, rendering and indexing as the actual product. Once I saw ecommerce as infrastructure and not keywords, I couldn't unsee it.

Organic shopping is going to get much more complicated before it gets simpler (if it ever does). We've spent years optimizing pages for Google search engines, and now we're optimizing the information that LLMs use to understand products, brands and merchants. This doesn't mean traditional SEO is dead. If anything, it shows us the fundamentals matter more than ever because AI systems need reliable, structured, accessible information to work from.

I also think we're going to see a bigger distinction between having a PDP and actually having a product that's machine-readable and discoverable across the search ecosystem. Product feeds, structured data, reviews, merchant information, availability and other trust signals are increasingly important. I'm very interested in the idea of "products over pages" here. The page is still important, but its days of doing the heavy lifting are limited.

I'm skeptical about the huge rush to declare every new AI feature "the future of ecommerce," though. We've been through enough SEO cycles to know that a shiny new interface doesn't automatically rewrite the fundamentals, and I would rather understand how the system actually retrieves and evaluates information before building an entire strategy around it.

The brands that'll win will treat SEO, product data, content, dev and merch as connected teams instead of putting everything in an SEO silo. The future of organic shopping looks less like, "SEO owns Google" and more like, "the entire org is responsible for making the product discoverable."

I'm working on growing my own little testing site. I intentionally built it around static HTML because I want the important stuff to be available without requiring a crawler or model to render the page first. My current obstacle is deciding what I want the site to actually do once people are there. This is where JavaScript gets tempting. I'm trying to figure out how much functionality I can add while keeping the core experience accessible in plain HTML. Ironically, I think it's a useful problem to have.

Productrise has changed how quickly I can gather and analyze metrics, then optimize based on what the data is actually showing. Merchant Center might consider itself user-friendly, but it hasn't met Productrise. The speed and clarity it brings to feed analysis make it much easier to identify patterns, test changes and act on opportunities without getting buried in manual work!

Learn how the business works, not just how Google works. The best SEO decisions usually happen when you understand the products, the customer, the technology and the business goals behind the site. It's easy to become very good at identifying SEO problems without understanding which ones actually matter.

Oh and start building relationships with your developers immediately. But that's for another interview.