AI visibility for e-commerce is whether an assistant names you when someone asks a question like “best <product type> under <price>”. It is decided by whether the engine can read your site and whether you are in the pages it retrieves — both are checkable, and the first is fixable from inside the site.
Four shapes of question decide AI visibility in e-commerce: best-for, alternatives-to, cheapest, and for-a-situation. The lines below are the kind an assistant hears every day; replace the brackets with your market.
An assistant answering those questions retrieves pages and names the companies in them. For e-commerce the pages it retrieves are usually:
A site that is not in those sources is not in the answer, however well it reads. A site that cannot be read is not in them either — and that part is checkable.
E-commerce sites are most often built on Shopify, Next.js, Cloudflare Workers. The checks they fail most are the ones that come with that:
What the agent does here: runs the 23 checks on your pages, switches on the fixes it can apply from inside the site — AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, Organization schema in every page, a sitemap, /llms.txt — writes the answer-first opening and the search description for your approval, and counts every AI visit page by page so you see which questions already bring an engine to you.
The longer guide for e-commerce →
Questions of four shapes: best-for, alternatives-to, cheapest and for-a-situation. For e-commerce that means lines like “best
Review aggregators and Trustpilot; Reddit buying-advice threads; "best
no cdn or bot filter blocks ai crawlers — bot management tuned against scrapers challenges AI crawlers too. robots.txt allows ai crawlers — a platform robots.txt that disallows collection and search paths an AI shopper would read. json-ld identifies the organization — Product schema is there; the Organization behind the store is not.
Allow the retrieval crawlers through the bot filter by verified IP range. Give every product page a server-rendered description and Product + Organization schema that match the visible text. Keep the Trustpilot and review profiles linked from the site with sameAs.
The free page check runs the 23 checks on your public pages — the ones above, measured on yours.