Why AI assistants see a blank page on some shops
Search engines learned to run JavaScript; most AI crawlers did not. Vercel and MERJ's 2024 study found that OpenAI's and Anthropic's crawlers, PerplexityBot and others download pages without running their scripts (Google's AI uses Googlebot, which does). A shop whose product names and prices are filled in by scripts can look empty to them.
How to tell
- Run the free check: it counts the text in the raw page, the way the crawlers get it.
- Or open your product page, choose View Source (not Inspect) and search for your product's price. If it isn't there, crawlers that don't run JavaScript can't see it.
How to fix it
- Hosted platforms (Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, WooCommerce themes) normally render products on the server; the problem usually comes from an app or a custom theme section.
- Custom builds: turn on server-side rendering or pre-rendering for product and category pages.
- Put the key facts (name, price, stock) in schema.org Product data in the HTML, too.
Check your shop free. It takes about 20 seconds and tells you exactly what’s blocked and the lines that fix it.
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