Free checklist

AI Shopping Readiness Checklist

More shoppers now ask an AI assistant what to buy instead of searching. Those assistants can only recommend products they can read and trust. None of this replaces normal SEO — most of it is the same groundwork, done properly — but stores that skipped it are now invisible in a second place too.

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1.Can AI crawlers reach your store?

WhyAssistants such as ChatGPT search (OAI-SearchBot), Perplexity (PerplexityBot) and Claude (Claude-SearchBot) use their own crawlers. Block them and your products can't be cited, however good they are.
How to checkOpen yourstore.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow rules under those user-agents, or under a catch-all that applies to them. Blocking training crawlers (e.g. GPTBot) is a separate choice from blocking search crawlers.
WhySome CDN and security settings challenge or block unknown bots by default. robots.txt says yes, but the request still fails.
How to checkCheck your CDN/firewall bot settings (Cloudflare, for example, has an explicit AI-crawler setting).
WhyCrawlers discover products through the sitemap and internal links. Pages that redirect, 404 or need a login don't get read.
How to checkOpen yourstore.com/sitemap.xml and spot-check a few product URLs from it.

2.Can they read your products?

WhyStructured data is the most reliable way to give a machine your price and stock status without it having to guess from the layout.
How to checkPaste a product URL into Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema.org validator.
WhyIdentifiers let an assistant match your product to the one a shopper asked about and compare it across stores.
How to checkCheck that barcode/GTIN fields are populated in your product admin and appear in the page's structured data.
WhyRatings help a recommendation, but markup that doesn't match the page is treated as spam.
WhyNot every crawler runs JavaScript. If the description, price or variants only appear after scripts run, some assistants see an empty page.
How to checkView the page source (not the inspector) and search for your price and a sentence from the description.

3.Would they trust and recommend you?

WhyAssistants answer questions. A product that states the answer gets quoted; one with three lines of brand copy doesn't.
WhyShoppers ask "which one ships fastest" or "can I return it". If your policy is in an image, a popup or a PDF, the answer isn't yours.
WhyConsistent business details are one of the signals that you're a real, established seller.
WhyGoogle's shopping surfaces — including its AI answers — lean heavily on Merchant Center data, and the feed is free to submit.

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More checklists

Store Launch Readiness Checklist Product Page & Catalog Content Checklist Onsite Search & Merchandising Checklist Profit Leak Self-Check

1.Can AI crawlers reach your store?

2.Can they read your products?

3.Would they trust and recommend you?