AI Visibility
AI Visibility measures how well AI assistants — like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — can find, read, and understand your store. As more shoppers use AI to research products and get recommendations, stores that are clear and accessible to these systems have an advantage. Stores that block AI crawlers or have thin content are simply invisible to them.
How the score is calculated
Your AI Visibility score runs from 0 to 100 and is built from five checks:
| Check | Max points | What it tests |
|---|---|---|
| AI Bot Access | 25 | Whether AI crawlers are blocked in robots.txt |
| llms.txt Quality | 10 | Whether your store has a structured summary file for AI |
| Product Content Quality | 40 | Description length, SEO fields, and image alt text |
| Collection Descriptions | 15 | Whether collections have descriptions |
| Brand & Store Pages | 10 | Whether About, Contact, and Privacy pages exist |
Score thresholds:
- 70 – 100 — Healthy
- 40 – 69 — Needs attention
- 0 – 39 — At risk
AI Bot Access
Max: 25 points
This check reads your store’s robots.txt file and looks for rules that block known AI crawlers, including GPTBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others.
What a failing result means: One or more AI crawlers are blocked. Those assistants cannot index your products or pages, so your store will not appear in AI-generated recommendations or search summaries.
How to fix it: Review your robots.txt file. If you intentionally blocked these crawlers, that is fine — just be aware of the trade-off. If the block is unintentional (for example, a blanket Disallow: / rule under a wildcard user-agent), update it to allow AI bots. Shopify lets you customise robots.txt through a Liquid template in your theme.
llms.txt Quality
Max: 10 points
/llms.txt is a plain-text file that gives AI assistants a structured summary of what your store is, what you sell, and how to contact you. It is not required by any platform, but AI tools are increasingly using it to build better answers about a business.
Points are awarded for:
- The file existing at
yourstore.com/llms.txt - Including a store description
- Including contact information
- Having customised content (not a default Shopify placeholder)
What a failing result means: Your store has no llms.txt, or the file is mostly empty or generic.
How to fix it: Create a file at /llms.txt on your store. Include a short paragraph describing what you sell and who you sell to, a contact email or link, and any other context that would help an AI assistant answer questions about your brand. Keep it concise and factual.
Product Content Quality
Max: 40 points
This is the highest-weighted check because product content is what AI assistants use to describe and recommend your products. Three things are tested:
- Short descriptions — products with a description under 100 characters
- Missing SEO fields — products without a meta title or meta description
- Images without alt text — product images with no alt attribute
Points are deducted proportionally based on how many of your products have these issues.
What a failing result means: AI assistants have very little to work with. If a product has a two-word description and no SEO fields, an AI cannot accurately describe it, which makes a recommendation unlikely.
How to fix it:
- Write product descriptions that are at least a sentence or two long. Explain what the product is, what it does, and who it is for.
- Fill in the SEO title and description fields in Shopify (under each product, scroll to Search engine listing).
- Add alt text to product images. Alt text describes the image for screen readers and AI crawlers alike. In Shopify, you can edit alt text by clicking on an image in the product editor.
Collection Descriptions
Max: 15 points
Collections group your products into categories. When an AI assistant tries to understand your catalogue — for example, to answer “does this store sell outdoor furniture?” — collection descriptions give it useful context.
What a failing result means: Most or all of your collections have no description. AI tools have to infer what a collection contains from product titles alone.
How to fix it: Add a description to each collection in Shopify under Products > Collections. A few sentences summarising the types of products in the collection and who they are for is enough.
Brand & Store Pages
Max: 10 points
This check looks for three pages that give AI assistants — and shoppers — basic information about your business:
- About page (any page with “about” in the URL or title)
- Contact page
- Privacy page
What a failing result means: One or more of these pages is missing. An AI asked “who runs this store?” or “how do I contact them?” has nothing to go on.
How to fix it: Create the missing pages in Shopify under Online Store > Pages. An About page does not need to be long — a paragraph about your brand, what you stand for, and where you are based is sufficient. Make sure the pages are linked somewhere on your site so they can be crawled.