Two-minute self-check
7 signs AI assistants can't see your store.
Tick the ones that apply. Each comes with a way to check it yourself, and the reason it matters. Nothing is sent anywhere: the count happens in your browser.
The seven signs
How to check: Type the question a customer would, for example "where to buy [your product] online", and read the answer.
This is the symptom. The six signs below are the usual causes.
How to check: Ask whoever runs your hosting, or run our instant crawler test: a refusal shows up in seconds.
In our study of 810 US stores, 86% of the stores refusing GPTBot declared it nowhere. The most plausible source is default bot lists in protection products, not a decision by the store.
How to check: Open yourstore.com/robots.txt in a browser and look for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or OAI-SearchBot.
In our study, 379 of the 440 stores whose server refused GPTBot had no rule against it in robots.txt. A silent robots.txt does not mean you are open: check what the server does.
How to check: Open a product page, press Ctrl+U (view source) and search for the price. If it is not in the source, it is filled in by JavaScript.
Most AI crawlers read the raw HTML and do not run JavaScript, so they see the page without those facts.
How to check: In the page source, search for "@type": "Product" or "@type":"Product".
Structured data states price, availability and brand in a form a machine reads without guessing.
How to check: In your analytics, open referral traffic for the last 90 days and look for those two domains.
When an assistant names a store with a link, some people click it. None at all is a signal worth checking.
How to check: Ask someone abroad to open your store, or use a VPN. A challenge page or a refusal counts.
Crawlers come from data centres, often in another country. In a 30-store comparison in our study, the location of the request changed the answer.
You ticked of 7.
Nothing ticked yet. If none of these apply, you are probably in good shape. To be sure about access, the instant crawler test takes ten seconds.
Worth a look. Start with the instant crawler test: it checks signs 2 and 3 for you in seconds.
Three or more is a pattern, not a coincidence. Get the free AI visibility check: we test all of this on your store and send the results within 24 hours.
One or two ticks: start with the instant crawler test. Three or more: get the free AI visibility check.
Where these come from
Signs 2, 3 and 7 come from our measurement of 810 US online stores. Signs 4 and 5 are what we check in the raw HTML in every free check report. We left out things that are often repeated but nobody has shown to matter to AI assistants.