Category pages now compete with aggregators
Your category pages used to compete with other stores. Now they compete with Google Shopping, Amazon, and AI-generated comparison surfaces. The rules have changed.
Three years ago, a well-optimised category page competed with other stores for the same keyword. The playing field was relatively level. Better content, stronger links, faster page — you ranked higher.
Now category pages compete with Google's own surfaces.
Search "women's cashmere jumpers" and the first thing you see is a shopping carousel with images, prices, and filters. Below that, a merchant listings grid. Below that, an AI overview. Below that, aggregator sites like Lyst or Shopzilla that Google treats as comprehensive resources.
Your category page — the one you spent six months optimising — sits below all of this.
The competitive set has expanded from "other stores" to "other stores plus Google's own commerce infrastructure plus aggregator platforms that Google prefers." And in most transactional verticals, Google's own surfaces absorb 40-60% of the above-fold space.
The response isn't to abandon category SEO. It's to understand that category pages now serve a dual function. They're still important for long-tail and filtered combinations where Google's surfaces are less dominant. But for head terms, their primary value has shifted from traffic generation to feed authority — the quality of your product data in Google Merchant Centre now determines your visibility in the shopping surfaces that actually get clicks.
The ranking algorithm for organic and the ranking algorithm for shopping are different systems with different inputs. Most ecommerce SEO strategies only optimise for one.
The stores winning the category fight are the ones treating product feed quality and organic SEO as two parts of the same visibility system, not two separate channels.