Part of GEOly's "GEO / AEO Expert Watch" series — meet Collin Colburn, a quick map of their public work and where to follow them, with links to the original sources.
Who is Collin Colburn
Leads commerce and retail-media research at the IAB (previously a decade at Forrester) and a prominent voice on the 'agentic shelf' — catalog enrichment, GEO inside LLMs, and why AI first helps shoppers narrow choices and reduce evaluation effort.
These experts look further ahead: as AI agents begin to compare, decide and even purchase for users, the entrance to commerce shifts from "humans clicking links" to "agents reading data." This is the layer after GEO. Their recurring focus areas include: Commerce data, IAB, agentic AI shopping.
What GEO / AEO practitioners can learn from Collin Colburn
- Product data becomes the fuel: structured, accurate, machine-readable product information decides whether your items enter an agent’s consideration set.
- Trust and rules: governance of payments, liability and authorization determines whether an agent dares transact with you on a user’s behalf.
- Agent Experience (AX): after UX, making AI agents understand and choose you efficiently becomes the new discipline.
GEOly angle: Data-backed angle: AI-shopping adoption and where agents help shoppers first.
What it means for brands going global
For DTC and ecommerce brands going global, agentic commerce is both threat and opportunity: the sooner you shape product data, reviews and trust signals into a machine-readable, trustworthy form, the more likely you are to be chosen in agent-led shopping.
Want to see how your own brand shows up across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers — and how you stack up against competitors? That is exactly what GEOly's brand GEO audit measures: citations, share of mentions and answer share, tracked over time.
Follow Collin Colburn
Meet more experts across GEO, AEO and agentic commerce in the .
