If you sell off Amazon, Google says do this NOW

This, this is the Billion Dollar Sellers Podcast. Your go-to source for cutting edge strategies and success stories from the world of Amazon and e-commerce. Buckle up and get ready to take your Amazon business to new heights. Don't forget to subscribe to the Billion Dollar Sellers Newsletter. Welcome your host, welcome your host, Kevin King. >> Hey everyone, welcome [music] to the Billion Dollar Sellers Podcast. I'm your host Kevin King and today is May 28th, 2026. Uh we've got a big show for you today, so uh let's get into what's coming up. The big story today is Google just published their first official guide on optimizing for AI search and they basically told every AEO and GEO consultant out there that uh most of what they've been selling is wasted money. We've also got Shopify opening up their catalog to every developer on Earth, a deep dive into what Amazon sellers get wrong selling on Walmart, a really cool launch calculator tool and some interesting stats on how chat GPT shopping actually stacks up against traditional channels. All right, quick announcement first. So today at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, me and Norman Farrar are hosting AI for Econ 2.0 and this is 75 minutes that I think could really change how you're running your Econ business. We're going through the new AI playbook for Econ sellers and there's a replay available if you can't make it live. There's a link to register in the show notes and uh I'd really love to see you there. All right, now here's your stump Bezos question for today. The average Google Ads cost per click has risen to $5.42 up from $5.26 in 2025. So what is the most expensive category on Google at an average of $9.87 per click? Think about that and I'll give you the answer at the end of the show. All right, let's get into it. So Google just published their first-ever official guide on optimizing for AI search and uh the headline's going to annoy a lot of people. Google's position is basically that optimizing for generative AI search is just SEO. It's the same crawl, the same index, the ranking systems as classic search. There's no separate door, no magic trick, and there's no special optimization you got to do. And, you know, that's a pretty big deal cuz there's been this whole cottage industry of AEO and GEO consultants popping up selling you special services to optimize for AI search. And Google just came out and said, "Yeah, that's that's not a thing." So, what does Google say actually moves the needle? Uh two things sit at the foundation. First, creating content that people find unique and compelling and useful. That's what's going to influence your presence in generative AI search more than anything else. And Google draws a hard line here between what they call commodity content, you know, your generic seven tips listicles that anyone could write, and non-commodity content, which is first-hand expertise, real reviews, stuff that an AI couldn't just regurgitate on its own. Second is technical hygiene. Your page is going to be indexed and eligible to show in Google search with a snippet to even appear in AI features. If Google bot can't crawl it, it can't cite it. Pretty simple. And they also say add quality images and video because AI surfaces pull those in, too, which opens up extra real estate beyond just the blue link. Uh now here's the spicy part, uh the myth-busting section. Now, Google explicitly tells you to stop wasting money on a bunch of stuff. First, all the mass dot text files and all this special AI markup stuff, Google says you don't need any of that. No special machine-readable files, no markdown, none of it. Content chunking, which is where people break their content into tiny little pieces. Google says there's no requirement for that. There's no ideal page length. Rewriting content just for AI. The AI understands synonyms and meaning, so you don't need to chase every long-tail keyword variation. Buying fake mentions across the web. Google says don't do that. And over-indexing on structured data. Schema isn't required for generative AI search, though uh it's still worth keeping around for rich results. So, basically everything that a lot of these AEO consultants have been selling you, Google just came out and said it's wasted spend. Now, the Amazon seller specific angle here is really interesting. Generative AI responses can surface product listings and product info. Google's Merchant Center feeds and Google Business Profiles help your product show up in AI responses and search results. So, if you're selling DTC alongside Amazon, the feed is now your AI visibility play. Google also mentioned something called business agents, which is a conversational experience on search that lets customers actually chat with your brand. And then there's this agentic section, that's the forward-looking one, where AI agents can perform tasks like comparing product specs, accessing sites by reading screenshots and DOM structure and accessibility tree. Also, Google points to this emerging universal commerce protocol or UCP. It's going to let search agents do a whole lot more. Now, there's some healthy pushback out there that Google's advice is, you know, right for their own services, but doesn't fully generalize to the other AI crawlers. And you know, schema still feeds into the knowledge graph, which sits upstream of AI overview, so it's not like it's useless. Just uh keep that in mind. But here's what you should do this week. First, if you've got an AEO or GEO vendor contract that's selling you LMS.txt files, content chunking, or AI specific rewrites, cancel it. Google just said it's wasted spend. Second, audit one product page. Is it indexed? Is it crawlable? Does it render without JavaScript blocking? Does it load fast? If Google can't read it, AI can't cite it. Third, replace one commodity page with a first-hand non-commodity piece, you know, something like why we killed our best-selling SKU instead of 10 tips for Amazon PPC. If you sell off Amazon, give a Merchant Center feed and a Google Business Profile live. That's now your direct line into AI overviews and shopping results. Add real images and video to your top pages. AI services pull them in, and most of your competitors won't bother. And keep your eye on UCP and business agent. Agentic commerce is the part that becomes a real channel in the next 12-18 months, and you want to be positioned early. All right, so me and Nora Ferraro just dropped an episode on the Marketing Misfits channel about stopping the AI marketing slop. We sat down with AI marketing expert Mike Turpin, and he breaks down this massive shift that's happening right now, which is the move from chatting with AI to actually managing AI agents. Mike talks about why traditional SaaS companies are in trouble, how to use first principles thinking to train your AI, and some of the honestly terrifying security risks of giving autonomous agents access to your data. If you want to survive the next wave of digital marketing, you got to stop acting like a prompt engineer and start acting like an AI orchestrator. There's a link to the full episode in the show notes. All right, let's talk about some interesting stats. So, there's a study out from Caiser and Shulze that looked at ChatGPT shopping versus other channels, and the takeaway is really fascinating. For complex products that need real explanation, ChatGPT actually outperforms search on conversion rates. But, for simple, low complexity products, the traditional channels still win. So, the complexity of your product changes the channel math completely. If you're selling something that needs education, needs context, needs comparison, ChatGPT shopping might be a better channel than you think. But, if you're selling something simple and impulse driven, your traditional channels are still where it's at. All right, so this next one is a really big deal. Shopify just announced that the Universal Commerce Protocol with Shopify Catalog is now open to every developer. Any mobile app, content platform, or AI agent can tap into Shopify's catalog of millions of merchants and billions of products through one protocol. So, here's the backstory. Shopify and Google co-developed UCP and launched it back in January at NRF. It's an open standard that lets any AI agent connect and transact with any merchant. More than 20 retailers backed it, including Walmart, Target, Etsy, and Wayfair. And at launch, the protocol powered adjunctive commerce on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, while everyone else sat on a waitlist. Well, that waitlist is gone now. The SDKs and APIs are public. The bazaar is open. And Shopify's president, Harley Finkelstein, put it like this. He said, "A solo developer now has the same commerce layer as the largest tech companies on the planet." Every new shopping experience a developer builds is another place for people to discover and buy merchant products. Nothing to set up. If a brand is on Shopify, it's already in. Now, think about what this actually means. For years, people figured Shopify would build a marketplace to fight Amazon. The Shop app was supposed to be the opening move. It never happened. Shopify didn't build a marketplace. They're turning the entire internet into one. And that's the part Amazon sellers should really sit with. The competition for product discovery is no longer just rank on page one. It's show up inside every app, every chatbot, every content platform a buyer touches. Shopify just handed millions of merchants a distribution layer that travels everywhere people spend time, and it costs those merchants nothing to be in it. If you sell on Amazon and nowhere else, your products live in exactly one box. Shopify merchants are about to live in every box a developer can dream up. So, what are you going to build? And more importantly, where are your products going to show up? All right. Now, software tool of the day. Uh so, this one is called the Amazon launch calculator, and it was built by Isaac Gross over at IGPP C. And the idea behind it is pretty simple, but really powerful. Most launches don't fail because the product is bad. They fail because a budget was fake. A seller says, "I want $50,000 a month." But never actually answers the real question, which is, "How much PPC spend does it take to get there?" So, you plug in your CPC, your conversion rate, your price point, and how much is organic versus PPC, what your revenue goal is, and it spits out everything. How much you actually need to spend, how many clicks and orders to expect, what your ACOS and TACoS look like, and it breaks it all down month by month. And if you don't know your CPC or conversion rate yet, they've got a quick launch estimator where you just drop in a competitor ASIN, and it gives you AI-powered estimates from market data, so you start with realistic numbers instead of guessing. From there, you can build scenarios side by side, conservative, moderate, aggressive, across 6 months, 12 months, uh whatever fits. And you know, the number one launch mistake is running out of money halfway through. Not enough spend to rank, not enough time for organic to build, so not enough budget to survive the learning phase. This tool shows you that before it happens, so it answers the one question every seller should ask before launch, which is, can my budget actually support my goal? There's a link to try it in the show notes. All right, so let's talk about Walmart. Um Walmart.com is not a secondary channel anymore. We're talking more than 500 million monthly visitors and a growing slice of omni-channel spend. But SellerActive says most brands treat it like a dumping ground for their Amazon content, set a price, and just, you know, pray the algorithm sorts it out, and it doesn't. The core problem is that Walmart growth isn't a listings problem, it's a full funnel problem. Brands that copy-paste from Amazon, optimize once and walk away, and run zero off-platform traffic, end up with flat sales, low listing quality scores, and widening gap between their Amazon and Walmart numbers. And there's three big mistakes sellers make here. First, they copy-paste from Amazon, and Walmart's search algorithm, attribute requirements, and shopper behavior are completely different animals. What works on Amazon is often completely wrong for Walmart, both structurally and strategically. So for example, on Amazon, your title is keyword stuffed and super long, right? Walmart doesn't want that. They want benefit-led titles with Walmart-specific keywords. Same thing with descriptions. Amazon is all HTML-heavy bullets, but Walmart wants short paragraphs, structured bullets, totally different format. Even the images are different. Walmart wants lifestyle images, infographics, and video above the fold. Second, they treat optimization as a one-time task. The platform keeps moving. Item spec updates, Gen AI integration, new attribute requirements. If you optimized 2 years ago, you're already behind. And third, they have no off-platform strategy. Organic ranking alone won't cut it on Walmart. The brands winning there are driving external traffic from Google Shopping, influencer content, and in-store activations, and then closing the attribution loop back to Walmart order data. Uh so, here's what to do. Audit your highest traffic, lowest converting SKUs first. That's where the money is hiding. Then work in this order. Prepare your above-the-fold content against the top competitors, assess your image stack for quality and completeness, check review count and recency on those SKUs, and verify your pricing is competitive inside the buy box window. Beyond the audit, rewrite your listing specifically for Walmart's algorithm instead of porting Amazon copy, migrate to the current item spec, get serious about WFS and Walmart to cut shipping costs and lift rank, and build at least one external traffic source feeding your Walmart listings. And before you run any Walmart Connect ads, make sure your listing quality score is above 85%. Your main image is optimized, you got lifestyle images, all five key features are written to Walmart's guidelines, you've got at least 20 reviews, your pricing is competitive, and you've got rich media live. If you don't hit those benchmarks first, you're basically throwing ad dollars at a listing that's not ready to convert. All right, before we wrap up, a few more hot picks for you. The Temu's traffic has recovered from last year's tariff slump, so they're back in the game. Amazon is timing seller-fulfilled prime speeds starting in July 6th, so if you're an SFP, pay attention to that. There's a really interesting piece out about how Amazon built an empire, but forgot the customer. Uh worth a read. And Amazon is going to start awarding a new arrival badge on seller's newest products, which could be a nice little boost for launches. Links to all of those are in the show notes. And here's your parting shot for today. This one's from Mary Kay Ash. She said, "No matter how busy you are, you must take time to make the other person feel important. Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying, 'Make me feel important.' Never forget this message when working with people." I think that's something we all forget sometimes, especially when we're buried in the day-to-day of running a business. But the people around you, your team, your suppliers, your customers, they all want to feel like they matter. And the sellers who get that tend to build the strongest businesses. And finally, about that stun Bezos question from the beginning, what is the most expensive category on Google Ads at an average of $9.87 per click? The answer is attorneys and legal services. $9.87 per click. Holy cow, that's almost double the overall average. Lawyers are paying through the nose for those clicks. All right, that's all for today, folks. Have a great weekend, and I'll see you again on Monday. This is Kevin King, signing off from the Billion Dollar Sellers podcast.