The agentic readiness checklist

Work through it in stage order. Fixing checkout while a bot wall blocks discovery buys you nothing.

Discovery

• robots.txt does not disallow shopping-agent user agents across the whole site. If you must restrict them, restrict /cart and /checkout, not /.
• A sitemap exists at a predictable location and is referenced from robots.txt.
• A machine-readable product feed is available. On Shopify, /products.json is served by default on most stores.
• Bot protection does not challenge identifiable, well-behaved agents before the storefront renders.
• You know what your CDN is doing on your behalf. Cloudflare separates Search, Training and Agent bot categories, and said on 1 July 2026 that from 15 September 2026, for new domains onboarding to Cloudflare, Training and Agent bots will be blocked by default on pages that display ads, with an opt-out in Security settings. Check which categories your domain allows before somebody else decides for you.
• Agents that reach you can identify themselves cryptographically. Shopify’s developer changelog of 7 May 2026 says bots and agents should identify themselves via Web Bot Auth, and that unsigned bots get the strictest rate limits on the Storefront API and on Shopify-hosted online store pages. You cannot sign someone else’s traffic, but you can stop treating signed and unsigned agents identically in your own rules.
• An llms.txt file describes your key pages. It is cheap and it is the first file some assistants look for.

Evaluation

• Product pages carry schema.org Product markup.
• offers.price and offers.priceCurrency are populated on every product.
• offers.availability distinguishes in-stock from sold-out.
• Products carry a GTIN, barcode or MPN, so an agent can match yours to the one a shopper named.
• Variant names are words a shopper would use. "Midnight Blue" and "UK 9" are readable; "COL-04" and "SZ3" are not, and an agent asked for a blue size 9 cannot tell that you have one.
• Returns and shipping policies are published as page text. Keep the graphic if you like it, and add the words as well. Shopify lists published store policies among its requirements for selling through agentic storefronts.
• The feed agrees with the storefront. A feed regenerated weekly will disagree with a price change made today.

Comparison

• Shipping cost and delivery time are determinable before checkout.
• The catalogue has a category structure an agent can navigate.
• Feed prices and page prices match, so you are never quoted at the wrong number.
• Product descriptions state the attributes a shopper compares on: material, dimensions, fit, compatibility, warranty. A description written entirely as brand atmosphere gives a comparing agent nothing to weigh you on.

Checkout

• Variant options are selectable by click and keyboard, not by hover alone.
• Adding to cart works without a JavaScript interaction an agent cannot perform.
• Checkout does not require creating an account.
• No popup or interstitial blocks the path from product to cart.
• No CAPTCHA sits between the cart and the payment step.
• Checkout completes in a mobile in-app browser. Shopify’s help centre says ChatGPT shoppers complete on your online store checkout in a ChatGPT in-app browser, so test it there: narrow viewport, no saved session, no extensions.

How to know where you stand

Every item above is observable from outside your store, which means it is testable without installing anything. The value of testing rather than assuming is that the failures are rarely the ones you would guess: the store owner who is sure their checkout is the problem usually turns out to have a policy published as an image.