AEO
Whether the catalogue can be lifted as a direct answer to a shopper's question.
Engage →Search engine optimisation
SEO
Whether conventional search engines can crawl, parse, and rank the catalogue.
What it costs to fail
A product with no type joins no comparison set — it is not ranked badly, it is not in the running. Where several URLs serve the same item with no canonical to settle it, an index picks one and drops the rest, so variants a shopper searches for are simply not there.
What is scored
Title and meta length/uniqueness, canonical tags, H1 structure, alt-text coverage, sitemap.xml validity, URL structure, product type, tag richness, Googlebot/Bingbot policy.
Each of these is a published criterion with a published weight — the full rubric.
What fixes it
Setting a product type and three or more tags puts each product into a comparison set instead of leaving it uncategorised. A valid sitemap.xml and one self-referencing canonical per page remove the duplicate-URL ambiguity that keeps variants out of an index.
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.
