Run an audit on your store and you get numbers back. Performance: 44. SEO: 35. AEO: 12. Most people look at those, feel vaguely bad, and close the tab. The numbers sound like a report card, and nobody does anything urgent about a report card.
They are not a report card. Each one is a bill you are already paying, every day, in orders that never happened. The useful question is not “is 44 good or bad” — it is “how much is 44 costing me this month, and is it costing me more than the 35?” Answer that and the fix order stops being a matter of taste.
Here is how to read each number as money.
Your performance score is the shoppers who left before they saw anything
A performance score is a proxy for one thing: how many people your store loses in the seconds before the page finishes appearing. Not people who disliked your product — people who never got to see it.
That loss is invisible in your analytics in the cruellest possible way. A shopper who leaves during loading often does not register as a meaningful session at all. Your conversion rate looks stable because the denominator quietly shrank along with the numerator. Nothing looks broken. There is just less of everything.
The scale is not a matter of opinion. Deloitte’s Milliseconds Make Millions study found that improving mobile site speed by a tenth of a second lifted retail conversions by 8.4%. A tenth of a second. Now look at your performance score and estimate how many tenths of a second sit between your store and a fast one.
This is also the number most likely to be worse than you think, because you test your own store on an office laptop over office wifi. Your customer is on a three-year-old phone, one bar of signal, in a queue somewhere. The score is measured closer to their reality than to yours.
Your SEO score is the customers who never arrive at all
Performance loses people who came. SEO loses people who were never sent.
An SEO score is not about ranking first for a big generic term — that fight is expensive and mostly not yours to win. It measures whether your pages are legible to a search engine at all: whether titles describe what is on the page, whether product data is structured, whether images carry text a crawler can read, whether the page is linked to from anywhere.
The cost here compounds in a way the others do not. A slow page still sells something to the people who wait. A page search engines cannot read sells nothing to the people who would have bought, because they are looking at a competitor’s page instead. And it keeps not-selling for as long as the gap stays open, silently, month after month, with no event you could point at.
If you want the specific ways a finished-looking page ends up invisible, we listed the most common ones in five silent page killers.
Your AEO score is the recommendation you are not getting
This is the newest number, and the one most store owners have never seen.
A growing share of shopping now starts with a question typed into an AI assistant instead of a search box. “Best waterproof jacket for commuting under $200.” The assistant does not return ten blue links for the shopper to browse. It returns an answer — a short list of specific products, with reasons.
Answer Engine Optimization is whether your pages can be read, understood and quoted by those assistants. Whether the material fact a shopper needs — what it is made of, who it fits, what happens if it does not fit, how fast it ships — exists on the page as text a machine can extract, rather than living inside an image, a tab that loads on click, or a paragraph of marketing language that answers nothing.
The cost of a low AEO score is the strangest one on this list, because you cannot see it happening. There is no lost session to count. Somewhere, a shopper described exactly your product to an assistant, and the assistant recommended three stores that were easier to read. You were never in the conversation. Nothing in your dashboard will ever tell you that happened.
This is the number most worth fixing early, for an unglamorous reason: almost nobody has fixed it yet. Competing on speed means competing against stores that have been optimising speed for a decade. Competing on machine-readability means competing against stores that have not started.
So which one do you fix first?
The honest answer is that it depends on where your traffic comes from today — and that is exactly what makes the question answerable rather than philosophical.
- If you already have traffic that is not converting — start with performance. You are paying to bring people to a door that opens slowly. Every other fix multiplies a number that speed is currently dividing.
- If your conversion rate is healthy but volume is flat — start with SEO. The page works on the people who reach it. The problem is how few reach it.
- If you are in a category people ask questions about — anything involving fit, comparison, compatibility, ingredients, or “which one should I get” — put AEO higher than its current reputation suggests. That traffic is being allocated right now, by systems that will not revisit the decision often.
What you should not do is fix in the order the numbers are printed, or fix the lowest number first because it looks worst. A 12 in AEO on a store nobody asks questions about matters less than a 35 in SEO on a store that lives off search.
How Omnise turns three scores into one list
Reading your own scores this way takes judgement and an afternoon. Two things exist so that you do not have to: Omnise AI Page Audit, which finds what the numbers are costing you, and the Omnise Experts Team, which fixes it.
Omnise AI Page Audit opens your live pages the way a shopper’s phone does, scores all three dimensions, and — this is the part that matters — ranks every issue by what it is costing you, not by how easy it is to fix. You get a list in order, with the expensive thing at the top. It runs in about a minute and it is free on every plan, including the free one.
If the list is longer than your week, the Omnise Experts Team takes it from there. Trained specialists who work on your store rather than on a template, and they commit to the outcome in writing: performance pushed to the maximum achievable on your store, an SEO score of 100, an AEO score of 85 or higher — or you get 100% of your plan fee back.
Either way, start by finding out what the numbers are actually costing you. That part is free.
