{"slug": "ai-agents-are-your-new-customers-i-built-a-checker-to-see-which-stores-they-can", "title": "AI agents are your new customers. I built a checker to see which stores they can actually read", "summary": "A developer built a free, no-signup checker that fetches an online store the way an AI shopping agent does and scores it against eight weighted checks, including whether AI search crawlers are allowed in robots.txt, whether product pages carry Product JSON-LD with name, image, price and currency, and whether refund, privacy and terms policies are published. The tool samples up to three product pages, distinguishes search bots like OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot from training crawlers like GPTBot, and reports llms.txt and agents.md at zero weight because no evidence yet shows agents rely on them. After a Shopify 429 response caused a false 'no structured data' result, the developer added retry-with-backoff and now flags pages that fail to load as warnings rather than failing the store.", "body_md": "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.\n\nI 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.\n\nOnce you strip it down, it comes to **8 checks**. They don't all count the same:\n\n| Check | Weight | \n|---|---|\n| Store is open (no password page) | **15** | \n| AI search crawlers allowed in robots.txt | **20** | \n| Refund, privacy and terms policies published | **20** | \n| Product pages carry Product JSON-LD (name, image, price, currency) | **20** | \n| Brand, stock, barcode, shipping and returns in that data | **10** | \n| `/.well-known/ucp` answers (Universal Commerce Protocol) | **10** | \n| Sitemap published | **5** | \n| Descriptions answer real questions | **5** | \n\n`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.\n\nPlenty 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:\n\n```\n# Blocks training only. Fine.\nUser-agent: GPTBot\nDisallow: /\n\n# Blocks ChatGPT search answers. Probably not what you meant.\nUser-agent: OAI-SearchBot\nDisallow: /\n```\n\nThe checker looks at **3** agents: `OAI-SearchBot`, `PerplexityBot` and `Googlebot`. Training blocks get a note in the report but don't lower the score.\n\nA public \"enter any URL\" tool turns into an SSRF tool unless you lock it down:\n\nIt samples up to **3** product pages, not one. A single product page lies too often: one product has rich data, the next has nothing.\n\nOn 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\".\n\nNow 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.\n\n`priceCurrency`, so agents can't compare prices` OAI-SearchBot`\nEach of these takes **under an hour** to fix. The problem is that nobody checks.\n\nThe checker is free and needs no signup: paste a store URL and you get a score with the exact fix for each failed check.\n\n👉 [Check if AI agents can read your store](https://fahadazhar.site/blog/is-my-shopify-store-ready-for-ai-agents)\n\nIf 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.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-agents-are-your-new-customers-i-built-a-checker-to-see-which-stores-they-can", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/fahadazhar1/ai-agents-are-your-new-customers-i-built-a-checker-to-see-which-stores-they-can-actually-read-4dd9", "published_at": "2026-11-06 07:39:48+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-11-06 07:52:38.241645+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-engine-optimization", "ai-crawlers", "ai-agents", "structured-data", "ai-search"], "entities": ["Shopify", "ChatGPT", "OAI-SearchBot", "PerplexityBot", "GPTBot", "Googlebot", "Universal Commerce Protocol"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-agents-are-your-new-customers-i-built-a-checker-to-see-which-stores-they-can", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-agents-are-your-new-customers-i-built-a-checker-to-see-which-stores-they-can.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-agents-are-your-new-customers-i-built-a-checker-to-see-which-stores-they-can.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-agents-are-your-new-customers-i-built-a-checker-to-see-which-stores-they-can.jsonld"}}