Prioritize storefront work in AEO
Read the AEO queue, distinguish ownership from state, and choose a page or site-wide improvement.
AEO & Agentic Storefronts helps you improve how clearly your store presents information to buyers and answer systems. Its Overview turns missing content, stale evidence, and validation problems into a queue you can work through deliberately.
In the Northgate ESD Packaging demo, start with a commercially useful question: can a buyer understand which packaging product fits their application and where to request help?
Understand the destinations
The current tabs are Overview, Pages, Site, Products, Intelligence, and Citations. Some explanatory text refers to “assets”; that means the underlying storefront material represented by Pages and Site, rather than a separate tab you need to find.
Pages contains the managed URL inventory. Site contains shared material such as discovery files, schema defaults, and policies. Products has its own drafting and review workflow. Intelligence explains evidence-backed opportunities; Citations records observations of model answers.
Choose the next action
- Select the correct account and storefront.
- Open Overview.
- Read the reason for the highest relevant priority.
- Follow the priority to its page, product, or site-wide destination.
- Check the evidence date and source ownership before proposing a change.
- Resolve the identified issue through that destination's review workflow.
The ordering considers severity, blocking issues, staleness, validation failures, and commercial importance. It is a repeatable work order, not a forecast of traffic or a search ranking score.
For Northgate, a missing specification on a frequently used product may deserve attention before an optional discovery improvement. The reason attached to the priority is what lets you make that decision rather than relying on the position alone.
Read ownership and state separately
An asset can be externally owned and valid, or Forge-owned and still a draft. Ownership tells you who supplies the content; state tells you what has happened to it.
| Evidence | Practical interpretation |
|---|---|
| Missing | The expected material was not found in the available evidence |
| Detected | Material exists, possibly from the store, theme, or another plugin |
| Draft | Proposed Forge content is awaiting later action |
| Invalid | A check found a problem to resolve |
| Stale | The source or evidence needs refreshing |
| Published | A publication exists; inspect verification for what renders |
Do not replace correct externally supplied content merely to make it Forge-owned. Review what is already present and improve the specific gap. This is especially important with schema, where several sources can describe the same entity.
Review pages and site-wide material
In Pages, inspect the managed inventory and narrow it to the record you need. Managed scope determines which WordPress URLs belong in that inventory. Discovery alone does not mean every discovered URL is managed. An empty inventory needs scope selection and a completed scan before it can support page-level work.
Refresh is explicit. Forge retains the most recent complete results if a later scan fails, so visible rows may remain while an error is investigated. Check freshness rather than treating the presence of rows as proof of a successful new scan.
In Site, review the existing discovery, schema defaults, and policy states. Capability descriptions marked Coming soon are not available commerce services. Publishing a discovery file does not activate payment or fulfillment.
Confirm the outcome
The useful result is a resolved issue on a named record, supported by current evidence and any applicable publishing verification. Record the specific improvement: for example, a reviewed packaging policy now appears in the intended site-wide asset.
If the storefront selector reports a conflict or no connection, have the account's operator correct the connection before scanning or writing. If a scan is not progressing, inspect the task state and error instead of starting repeated overlapping scans.