By Steve Merrill, Founder of WRKNG Digital | September 23, 2026
You can't fix what you haven't measured. Run these nine checks on your ten best sellers and you'll know exactly why AI is or isn't recommending your store.
Most of these take minutes. All of them beat guessing.
1. Does structured data pass the Rich Results Test?
Run each product URL through Google's Rich Results Test. Note every blank or error: price, availability, GTIN, brand.
This one check surfaces most AI visibility problems in five minutes.
2. Is price in the raw HTML?
View source and search for your price. If it's not there, it's being painted on by JavaScript and machines may miss it.
Same test for availability. Both need to be present on load.
3. Are specs text or images?
Try to select your spec text with your cursor. If you can't, it's an image, and AI can't read it.
Convert those to real text. This is the most common invisible-to-AI problem there is.
4. Do feed and page agree?
Compare price and availability in your product feed against the live page. Any disagreement is a contradiction AI may resolve by dropping you.
Check your top sellers first. A stale feed price hides best sellers from AI answers.
5. Is review markup present?
Confirm your reviews carry review or rating schema, not just visible stars. Markup turns them into a signal AI can quote.
If you collect reviews but don't mark them up, you're leaving trust signals unread.
6. Are your categories consistent?
Check that the same product type uses one category scheme across the catalog. Inconsistent categories confuse the shortlist you belong on.
Clean categories keep your product relationships readable to a machine.
7. Can assistants actually name you?
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI to recommend products in your category. Write down whether you appear and who does instead.
This is your baseline mention rate. Everything else is in service of moving it.
8. Is your robots and crawl access open to AI?
Confirm you're not accidentally blocking AI crawlers that need to read your pages. A blanket block quietly makes you invisible.
Check your robots rules and any bot-management settings that might be too aggressive.
9. Do key pages lead with a direct answer?
Read the top of your important pages. If the answer to the obvious question isn't in the first two sentences, it's hard to cite.
Fix the opening and existing pages become citable without a rewrite.
Further reading
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I audit my Shopify store for AI shopping visibility?
Run nine checks on your ten best sellers: structured data in the Rich Results Test, price and availability in the raw HTML, specs as text not images, feed-page agreement, review markup, consistent categories, whether assistants name you, open AI crawl access, and whether key pages lead with a direct answer. Together they explain why AI does or doesn't recommend you.
What's the fastest check to run first?
Put your product URLs through Google's Rich Results Test. It surfaces most AI visibility problems, missing price, blank availability, absent GTIN, in about five minutes, which tells you where to spend the rest of your effort.
Could I be blocking AI crawlers by accident?
Yes. Overly aggressive robots rules or bot-management settings can block the AI crawlers that need to read your pages, which quietly makes your store invisible to those assistants. Review your robots rules and confirm you're not blocking the crawlers you want.
Want to know if AI assistants can actually find and recommend your store? Get a free AI-visibility read on your Shopify store at WRKNG Digital. We show you exactly what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI see when they look at your products.
