SEO
Whether conventional search engines can crawl, parse, and rank the catalogue.
Engage →Answer engine optimisation
AEO
Whether the catalogue can be lifted as a direct answer to a shopper's question.
What it costs to fail
An engine that cannot find a quotable answer summarises the page in its own words instead. The shopper still gets the answer; the store loses the attribution, the citation and the click that follows it.
What is scored
FAQPage and HowTo schema, question-shaped headings, answer-first paragraph structure, list and table density, description depth.
Each of these is a published criterion with a published weight — the full rubric.
What fixes it
A description past ~180 characters that opens with a declarative sentence and carries a list or table gives an answer engine something it can quote. FAQPage or HowTo markup turns existing support copy into a citable answer rather than prose an engine has to summarise.
The other three
Every scan runs all four, in every tier. A catalogue that clears this pillar can still be invisible to the systems the others cover.
