Stall library · Discover
No products found for an agent to read
A no catalogue finding means the scan reached the site, no bot protection stood in the way, and it still could not find one product: no catalogue endpoint answered, no sitemap listed a product page, and the home page linked to none. An AI shopping agent arriving here has nothing to read and nothing to buy, so this is the only finding the scan reports and the discover stage is marked stalled.
Why the agent stops
An agent finds products the way the scan does: it asks the platform for a feed, reads the sitemap for product pages, and follows product links from the home page. When all three come back empty the agent has no product to evaluate, compare or buy, and the journey ends before it starts.
Two very different sites produce this finding. One is not a store at all, in which case there is nothing to fix and the finding is simply a description. The other is a store whose catalogue is hidden from every surface an agent uses: products behind a search box, a JavaScript app that renders links the scan never sees, or a sitemap that lists only marketing pages.
How often we see this
Not published yet. Ottom does not have a benchmark dataset large enough to state how often this stall occurs, so this space is empty rather than filled with an estimate. The figure will appear here when it exists, alongside the methodology behind it.
See it for yourself
- Open your home page and look for a link to any product page in the HTML itself, not one that appears only after scrolling or clicking.
- Open /sitemap.xml and check whether any URL in it is a product page.
- On Shopify open /products.json; on WooCommerce open /wp-json/wc/store/v1/products. On anything else, check whether a product feed exists at all.
What to change
- If this is not an online store, do nothing. The scan is describing the site accurately.
- Publish a product feed, or make sure the one your platform serves is not blocked.
- List product pages in the sitemap and reference the sitemap from robots.txt.
- Link at least the main collections and a few products from the home page in plain HTML.
What Ottom looks at
Ottom reports this after the site has answered and no wall was detected, when the catalogue adapters found nothing, the sitemap listed no product page, and the home page linked to none. It is reported alone: the other discover findings assume a catalogue exists, and advising on how to publish one better would be the wrong conversation.
Terms used here
Questions
My site is not a store. Why was it scanned?
Anyone can ask for a free scan of any address, and the scan runs whatever it finds. For a site with no products, this finding is the whole result and nothing else is claimed about it.
I have hundreds of products. Why does the scan see none?
Because none of them is reachable the way an agent looks: through a feed, a sitemap entry, or a plain link from the home page. Products that exist only behind a search box or inside a script-rendered app are invisible to a reader that does not run your JavaScript. Publish a feed and a sitemap and the next scan will read them.