The agentic commerce checklist for Shopify stores
Agentic commerce is the name for what happens when the shopper is an AI agent acting for a person: it finds the product, checks the store, and in some cases completes the purchase. Whether that agent can do any of that with your store comes down to a short list of things in your own admin.
This is that list. Fourteen checks, in the order you meet them in Shopify, each with what to look for and what to change. An afternoon covers it.
Online Store, Themes, Edit code
1. robots.txt.liquid allows the search crawlers.
Look for OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. If either is followed by Disallow: /, remove that block or add Allow: /products/ and Allow: /collections/ for it. If you are blocking GPTBot or Google-Extended on purpose, that is a training decision and can stay.
2. /policies/ is readable, or its content lives elsewhere.
Shopify's default disallows /policies/. Either allow it, or make sure the same text is on ordinary pages (/pages/shipping, /pages/returns, /pages/contact) and linked from the footer.
3. The product template outputs Product JSON-LD.
Open a product page in a browser, view the source, and search for application/ld+json. There should be a block with "@type": "Product". If there is not, an app or a theme edit has removed it, and it is the single most valuable block on the page.
4. The block includes the GTIN.
In the same JSON-LD, look for gtin, gtin13 or similar. If the barcode field is filled in and the block still lacks it, the theme is not outputting it and needs a one-line change.
Products
5. Every variant has a barcode.
Products, open a product, scroll to the variant. The barcode field is the GTIN. Empty is the usual state; filling it is dull work that matters more than almost anything else on this list, because it is how an agent matches your listing to the same product everywhere else and to its reviews.
6. Titles say what the thing is.
Brand, product type, then the one or two attributes a shopper would ask for. Read each title with the image covered. "Field Cap" passes. "Field" does not.
7. Descriptions carry a specification with units.
Material, dimensions, weight, capacity, compatibility, care. A short bulleted list is enough. An agent extracts facts and cannot infer them from a photograph or from "designed for life on the move".
8. Vendor and product type are filled in and consistent.
Both fields feed the catalogue an agent reads first. Ten products typed "Jumper", "jumpers" and "Knitwear" are three categories to a machine.
9. More than one image, each with alt text.
The alt text is the only part of an image an agent reads. "IMG_4471" is not a description.
Online Store, Navigation and Pages
10. Shipping, returns and contact are linked from the footer.
An agent that starts at your homepage follows links. If those three pages are only reachable from a checkout modal or a help widget, they do not exist to it.
11. Each policy states facts, not reassurance.
Dispatch time, delivery time, cost, the free-shipping threshold, the returns window, how refunds are paid, an email address and a phone number. "We aim to get your order to you as quickly as possible" is a sentence an agent cannot use.
12. There is a contact page with an address a person could write to.
Trust, to an agent, is partly whether the store can be reached.
The root of the site
13. /products.json opens in a browser. Your store address plus /products.json. If it shows JSON, the catalogue is public. If it shows a bot-protection page, whatever is protecting the store is blocking every agent as well, and this one check outranks the other thirteen.
14. There is an llms.txt. A short plain-text file at /llms.txt naming the store, what it sells, where the policies are and where the catalogue is. Not every agent reads it yet, and the ones that do read it first. It costs ten minutes.
When you have done the list
Run the free check below. It reads the store the way an agent does and tells you where you stand on five of these fourteen in a few seconds, which is the fastest way to find out whether a change actually took.
Then leave it alone for a while. None of this needs maintaining week to week. It needs doing once, properly, and checking again after a theme change or a new app, which is when things quietly break.
Check your own store
The free check reads a Shopify store the way an assistant does and gives five answers in a few seconds: whether the catalogue can be read, whether a product page carries structured data and a GTIN, which AI crawlers are blocked, and whether the policy pages are linked. No login, no email needed for the answers.
The full audit is the same reading done properly: the whole catalogue, fifteen product pages, policies, speed and eight buyer searches, ranked into a fix list with examples from your own products. £99, within 24 hours.