Stall library · Evaluate
Product feed is out of date with the storefront
A stale feed is a machine-readable catalogue that no longer matches the storefront, so AI agents reading it are working from prices and stock that may no longer be true. This is worse than having no feed in one specific way: an agent trusts a feed, so a stale one produces confident wrong answers about you rather than cautious ones.
Why the agent stops
A feed is a promise that the fields in it are current. Agents treat it that way, which is the point of publishing one. When the promise is broken, the agent quotes a price you no longer charge or recommends an item you no longer have, and the shopper discovers it at your checkout.
Stale feeds are usually a scheduling artefact rather than a bug. A feed regenerated nightly is up to a day wrong, and a feed regenerated weekly cannot survive a sale.
How often we see this
Not stated here. A frequency means nothing without the cohort it was counted over, and this page is about one stall rather than one category. Where a category has enough stores measured at every stage, the share of them showing this stall is published on its benchmark page, with the methodology beside it.
See it for yourself
- Open your feed and note the most recent updated timestamp across all products.
- Change a price on one product in your admin, then reload the feed and see how long the change takes to appear.
- Compare feed prices with storefront prices for ten products, choosing sale items first.
What to change
- Regenerate the feed on publish, so a price change reaches it the same day.
- If regeneration is expensive, make it incremental rather than infrequent.
- Include an updated timestamp per product so consumers can reason about freshness themselves.
- Treat the feed as a projection of the same source of truth the storefront renders from, not as a separate export.
What Ottom looks at
Ottom reads the newest update timestamp in the feed and raises this finding when the freshest product in your catalogue was last touched more than thirty days ago. The report names the actual age rather than the threshold.
Questions
Is an old feed a problem if my catalogue rarely changes?
A genuinely unchanged catalogue with old timestamps is a weaker signal than a changed one, which is why this is reported at medium severity rather than high. It is still worth confirming the feed reflects current prices, because the case where it silently stopped regenerating looks identical from outside.
How fresh does a product feed need to be?
Fresh enough that a price change reaches the feed before a shopper acts on the old one. For most stores that means on publish, and for stores that run flash sales it means immediately.