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

Oct 18, 2026

Four very different storefronts side by side, a glass-fronted box, a shop with a striped awning, a small kiosk and a tall tower, all lit by the same wide beam from above.

Most of what gets written about AI shopping visibility assumes Shopify. Fair enough: a lot of stores run on it. But AI assistants don't care what your store is built on. They fetch your pages, read what is there and decide whether you are worth recommending. A WooCommerce store, a Magento store and a hand-built one all face the same reader.

So here is the checklist we use, with nothing platform-specific in it. Work down it in order: each step only pays off once the one before it is in place.

1. Let the AI crawlers in

An arched garden gate standing open, with small glowing orbs and simple product shapes lined up along a path that runs through it.
If the crawlers can't get through the gate, nothing else on this list matters.

Check your robots.txt for rules that block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended or Bingbot. Security plugins and bot settings at your hosting or CDN can block them too, without anyone ever deciding to.

2. Put the facts in structured data

Every product page should carry Product markup in JSON-LD: name, description, image, brand, price, currency and availability. WooCommerce adds basic Product markup out of the box, so check that it is complete and that an SEO plugin isn't adding a second, conflicting copy. Other platforms vary; view a product page's source and search for “application/ld+json” to see what yours outputs.

3. Write descriptions for the question, not the spec sheet

Manufacturer copy and a list of dimensions tell an assistant what a product is, not who it is for or when it is the right choice. Add a sentence or two about use, audience and what makes it different.

4. Describe your images

Three framed tiles in a row showing a soap pump bottle, a steaming cup and a camera, each with a blank caption bar beneath.
Alt text is how a reader that can't see your photos learns what is in them.

Alt text is how an assistant reading your page learns what your photos show. Describe the product, its colour and its setting in plain words, and skip “image of”.

5. Give broad questions a page to land on

Category and collection pages with a real description, and ItemList markup listing their products, give assistants something to point at when the question is “what should I get for…” rather than one exact product.

6. Keep it fresh and consistent

  • A sitemap that lists your products, with honest last-modified dates.
  • Stock status in your markup that matches the page: nothing sold out marked as in stock.
  • Prices in your markup that match the price on the page.

Check your store in one go

A magnifying glass hovering over a grid of small tiles, the tiles beneath it glowing brightest while those at the edges fade into the dark.
A scan checks the whole list at once and tells you what to fix first.

The free scan at cortexcommerce.ai/scan runs these checks on any online store, whatever it is built on: crawler access, structured data, descriptions and images. Give it your store's address and it tells you what to fix first.

Want the fixes made for you, not just a list? CortexGuard does it for Shopify stores today and is rolling out to WooCommerce stores by invitation. Running something else, or more than one website? The CortexCommerce app brings the same tools to any store, for as many websites as you run.