Learn / Assistants
Can Perplexity buy from your store?
Whether any assistant can buy from your store is decided by three things that do not vary between them: whether you permit the fetch, whether your catalogue can be enumerated, and whether your published data answers the constraints a shopper stated. What does vary is where the purchase completes, and that changes often enough that the reliable answer comes from each vendor’s current documentation rather than from an article.
Whether Perplexity can buy from your store is decided by the same three things that decide it for any assistant, and only the third part of the answer is Perplexity specific.
The three things that do not vary
- Permission. Your robots rules and your CDN decide whether the fetch happens at all. See how to configure robots.txt for AI shopping agents.
- Enumeration. A sitemap listing products and a current feed decide whether your catalogue is cheap enough to consider. See how to publish a product feed for AI agents.
- Legibility. Price, availability at variant level, identifiers and terms decide whether you survive a comparison. See how to add product schema for AI agents.
A store that fails any of these fails it for every assistant at once, which is why assistant specific optimisation is usually the wrong place to start.
The part that is assistant specific
Where a purchase completes differs between assistants, and it has changed more than once during 2026. That is the detail worth reading from the vendor rather than from an article, including this one: a page written on a date is a snapshot, and this particular fact has a short half life.
What is stable is the consequence. If the purchase completes on your checkout, your checkout has to survive a cold session in a narrow in-app browser. If it completes in the assistant’s own channel, your product data carries the entire sale with no page for anyone to look at.
How to find out for yourself
Your server logs will tell you whether Perplexity’s agents are reaching you and what they were served, which is more informative than asking the assistant whether it can see you. An assistant answering from memory produces the same confident sentence either way.
See how to identify AI agent traffic in server logs and how Perplexity shopping works for merchants.
Questions
Where does a Perplexity purchase complete?
Check Perplexity’s own current merchant documentation, because this is exactly the detail that moves. What does not move is that being considered at all depends on your data being readable, which you can verify today.
Do I need to do anything Perplexity specific?
Very little. Assistant specific work is almost always a distraction from the shared fundamentals, and a store that is readable, enumerable and buyable does well across assistants rather than needing to be tuned for each.
Should I allow it in robots.txt?
Decide the category rather than the name. Naming individual tokens means every new assistant arrives governed by your default rule, and if that default is a disallow you are opted out of each new channel silently.