Before you think about ranking in AI answers, make sure an agent can read your store and finish a purchase on it. Five checks cover most of it.
1. Content that doesn't depend on JavaScript. Vercel's agentic commerce guide (Oct 1), which also covers Vercel's own products, notes that background crawlers like GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic) and PerplexityBot (Perplexity) fetch HTML without executing it, while browser-based agents run a real browser. If your price, stock status or variant options render client-side, the first group may never see them. Test: right-click a product page, choose View page source, and look for price, availability, variants and a shipping and returns summary. If you run a bot challenge, your own browser may already have passed it, so also check your CDN logs for the crawlers' requests and the status code each one got.
2. Structured data that matches what people see. Google's guidance for AI features asks site owners to make sure structured data matches the visible text on the page, and says no special schema is needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Run your top product pages through Google's Rich Results Test and compare the markup price and availability to the page. If they differ, ask whoever manages your theme, and check whether your theme and an SEO app both add product markup.
3. Feeds you control. Google recommends keeping your Merchant Center information up to date, and Vercel's October guide says AI Mode draws on that feed. ChatGPT shopping reads a feed you push; OpenAI says onboarding is currently available to approved partners, by application. Shopify says products in its Agentic Storefronts are discoverable in ChatGPT by default for eligible stores, stay synced across AI channels, and arrive in the admin as orders with ChatGPT referral attribution. Check which channels are enabled in the Agentic settings in your admin. Not on Shopify: check Merchant Center for products flagged with issues, and apply through OpenAI's commerce page if you want a ChatGPT feed.
4. A checkout an agent can finish. In a study published in November 2025, Time Under Tension ran three browser agents against 11 Australian retailers. The agents completed shopping tasks 79% of the time, and co-founder Tim O'Neill said: "The single biggest barrier we discovered was bot verification." Look at your flow as an agent would: is guest checkout available where your business allows it, are form fields labeled, and where do human-verification challenges sit? Forter reported in October that automated fraud had doubled over the previous two months, so the goal is not removing checks; it's placing them so verified agents get through. On Shopify, checkout's own bot protection is run by Shopify; your levers are any bot-protection app and your fraud tool's rules. Ask those vendors how they treat verified agents before you change a rule.
5. Policies in text, on the page. Delivery windows, shipping costs, return rules and sizing guides answer the questions shoppers now ask assistants. Google's guidance asks that important content be available as text. A policy that lives in an image or behind a modal is harder for any machine to quote correctly.
None of these is new. It matters more when one reader never runs your scripts and another has to get past your bot checks to buy.
Next in Navigations: policies and access, meaning who you let in and on what terms.
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