Kenny Trusnik, founder of the Cleveland-based marketing agency Forest City Digital, shared his strategy for attracting customers to new ecommerce stores in an AI-driven market. Trusnik's primary recommendation is to focus on getting product data as deep and clean as possible in a structured environment, then opt into Practical Ecommerce, which exposes a merchant's catalog to prominent LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. His agency is seeing upwards of 10% of online revenue come from LLM visibility for many clients.
For new merchants with limited resources, Trusnik recommends acquiring links in prominent listicles or best-of articles, as these serve as strong signals for LLMs. Beyond paid acquisition, he emphasizes that content must contain original information unavailable elsewhere, since AI-generated content is by definition repurposed. Structured data such as Schema.org markup is critical because it helps crawlers and algorithms understand a site, its products, and its purpose. For commerce practitioners, this shift means that product data quality and AI visibility have become foundational channels alongside traditional search and social marketing.