The Symphony Store: AI Discovery (AEO)

The Symphony Store: AI Discovery (AEO)

Jason Braun

Launch website

Project Overview

The Symphony Store is the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's official shop: recordings, apparel, and gifts tied to one of the world's great orchestras. In spring 2026 they asked us to get the catalog ready for AI search (ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Mode, and Shopify's Agentic Storefront) ahead of a summer rebrand.

We built a new theme structured for answer engines, published it live on June 29, and handed it to their developers. They used it as the starting point for the July merchandise refresh.

This is a build case, not a conversion case. The work is the architecture.

The Challenge

A symphony catalog is not a normal DTC assortment. Shoppers (and now AI agents) search by conductor, composer, soloist, ensemble, and recording, not just product title. Those names were buried in descriptions. FAQs were hard to use. Size charts were not structured. Press quotes lived inside product copy.

If AI cannot name the people on a recording, the store does not show up when someone asks for Solti, Muti, or a specific CSO Resound album.

What we built

  • Catalog and metafield structure for AI discovery across a uniform product template
  • Linked, reusable profiles for every recording's conductors, composers, soloists, and ensembles, each tied to authoritative sources so AI can recognize them by name
  • Product-level FAQ fields the store team can fill without a developer
  • Accessible, on-page apparel size charts built on metaobjects
  • A dedicated press-quote block, then a cleanup pass so quotes were not duplicated in descriptions
  • Keyboard and screen-reader fixes on the existing FAQ page
  • A publishing checklist and settings comparison so the new theme could become the live storefront
  • Developer handoff: how the theme works, what the team can change without code, and how to validate updates

What happened next

The theme went live at https://symphonystore.com. CSO's developers took the AEO theme as their starting point for the July 1 rebrand. We stayed on for description cleanup and a later custom-fields pass.

We will add search and traffic results here once the catalog has had time in the wild.

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