A shopper asks ChatGPT for "a waterproof hiking jacket under $150 that ships to Dubai". The answer gets built from whatever the agent could read in the few seconds it spent on your store. If it couldn't read you, you aren't in the answer. Nobody tells you that you lost the sale.
I kept getting the same question from store owners: "Are we visible to these things or not?" Guessing wasn't good enough, so I built a checker that fetches a store the way an agent does and scores what it finds.
Once you strip it down, it comes to 8 checks. They don't all count the same:
| Check | Weight |
|---|---|
| Store is open (no password page) | 15 |
| AI search crawlers allowed in robots.txt | 20 |
| Refund, privacy and terms policies published | 20 |
| Product pages carry Product JSON-LD (name, image, price, currency) | 20 |
| Brand, stock, barcode, shipping and returns in that data | 10 |
/.well-known/ucp answers (Universal Commerce Protocol) |
10 |
| Sitemap published | 5 |
| Descriptions answer real questions | 5 |
llms.txt / agents.md get reported but weigh 0. Nobody has shown agents rely on them yet, and I didn't want the score to reward hype.
Plenty of stores added blanket AI blocks in 2024 to stop training scrapers, and they took out the search bots in the same line. Training bots and shopping-answer bots are different user agents:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /
The checker looks at 3 agents: OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot. Training blocks get a note in the report but don't lower the score.
A public "enter any URL" tool turns into an SSRF tool unless you lock it down:
It samples up to 3 product pages, not one. A single product page lies too often: one product has rich data, the next has nothing.
On a first run, a big store scored badly on "product data". The JSON-LD was there. Shopify had answered my second request with a 429 (rate limited), and my code read the empty body as "no structured data".
Now a 429 gets polite retries with backoff. If the page still won't load, the report says "didn't load" as a warning instead of failing the store. A checker that confidently tells you wrong things is worse than no checker at all.
priceCurrency, so agents can't compare prices OAI-SearchBot
Each of these takes under an hour to fix. The problem is that nobody checks.
The checker is free and needs no signup: paste a store URL and you get a score with the exact fix for each failed check.
👉 Check if AI agents can read your store
If you build stores for clients, run it on one of yours and tell me in the comments what it caught. I'm still tuning the weights.