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Notes on building CortexCommerce, in public — what we shipped, what we learned, and what didn't work the first time.

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Latest

Microsoft Now Lets You Watch an AI Agent Try to Shop Your Store

Microsoft Clarity now simulates an AI agent shopping your site and reports where it got stuck, and it puts Shopify and WooCommerce catalogs into Copilot and Bing.
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AI Mode Now Sells in Canada. What Google Reads Before It Picks Your Product

AI Mode checkout opened to Canadian shoppers on 4 November. Google picks from your Merchant Center feed, which now takes up to 30 questions and answers per product.

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AI Shoppers Buy From the Back of Your Catalog. Shopify's Own Numbers Say So

Shopify says 74% of AI-attributed purchases in Q3 came from outside its top 100 categories. Why agents sell the products you never polish, and how to find them.

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On Shopify, AI Agents Now Get Your Product Fields, Not Your Product Page

Shopify's Fall '26 Edition opens the catalog to any AI agent. What travels is six product fields, not your theme, so the description now has to carry the whole page.

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Enrich Your Catalog Before Black Friday, Not During It

AI assistants will send more shoppers this Black Friday, and they read your product pages first. Why November is the window to fix thin product data, at catalog size.

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Shoppers Stopped Searching by Category. Has Your Catalog Noticed?

AI shoppers ask for “gear for a rainy city commute”, not “jackets”. How to organize a catalog around shopper intent, and how CortexGuard Themes does it for you.

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Your Shopify Product Tags Are Doing More Work Than You Think

Product tags quietly run your collections, filters and search. What they power, what a good tag looks like, and how to enrich them without breaking anything.

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The Collection Page Is the Page AI Assistants Want to Recommend

For a broad shopping question, one well-described collection beats forty product pages. How to write and mark up collection pages AI assistants can use.

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AI Visibility Isn't a Shopify-Only Problem: A Checklist for Any Store

WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce or built by hand: AI shopping assistants read every store the same way. A platform-neutral checklist, and a free scan to check yours.

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How Many Shoppers Did AI Send You, and Did They Land on the Products You Enriched?

A look inside CortexGuard's new Visibility page, using one real store's numbers: AI shoppers on enriched products against the rest, week by week and run by run.

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What Is AI Visibility? A Plain-English Guide for Shopify Merchants

AI shopping assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity are recommending products right now. Here's what 'AI visibility' means, and how to check if your store shows up.

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How AI Shopping Assistants Actually Read Your Product Pages

Structured data is the heaviest category in AI-visibility scoring. Here's what Product JSON-LD does, why it's inconsistent across Shopify themes, and how to fix it.

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Fixing Thin Shopify Product Descriptions at Scale, Without Losing Control

Bulk AI product descriptions for Shopify that stay on-brand, never touch price or SKU, and wait for your approval before anything goes live.