Can AI assistants read your custom-built shop?
AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity recommend what they can read. Two things decide it: whether their crawlers may reach your shop, and whether your product pages give them the product’s name, price and stock in the standard format they read.
In our research, 52% of 558 custom-built and other shops we checked give AI assistants no product data or leave out the price or stock, and 3% block AI search assistants. See the research
Product data on a custom-built shop
A custom-built shop has product data only if its developer added it to the product page template. It is the group most often missing it.
Letting AI crawlers in
robots.txt is a file your developer controls; a firewall or CDN in front of the site can also refuse AI crawlers. Blocking AI training crawlers is your choice and doesn’t hide you from AI answers; blocking AI search crawlers does.
Fixing it
- Product data for custom-built shops
- Fix every product page (a quote first, from your sitemap)
- AI Agent Readiness Report (what your shop needs so AI agents can find, read and buy from it)
Other platforms: WooCommerce · Shopify · Wix · Magento (Adobe Commerce) · Squarespace · PrestaShop · OpenCart