Questions
Questions about AI agents and online stores
Every question here is answered in a paragraph, on its own page, with the page that treats the subject in full linked underneath. Grouped by the stage of the purchase an agent is at when it comes up.
Discover
- Do AI shopping agents actually obey robots.txt?
- Can I block AI training crawlers but not shopping agents?
- Will fixing robots.txt make my store agent ready?
- Why does my store block agents when I never chose to?
- How do I tell a bot wall apart from a slow site?
- Does allowlisting an agent expose me to scrapers?
- My site is not a store. Why was it scanned?
- I have hundreds of products. Why can agents see none?
- My customers see every product. Why does this matter?
- Do I have to rebuild the site?
- Why can agents not read product pages that open for me?
- Why is my readiness score lower than my findings suggest?
- Are unreadable product pages the same as a bot wall?
- Do I need a sitemap if my products rank well in search?
- Should I check the sitemap my platform generates?
- Is a product feed the same as structured data?
- Does publishing a feed help competitors scrape my prices?
- Is rich results markup the same schema agents read?
- Does schema markup an app injects after load count?
- Do assistants actually read llms.txt?
- What should a store put in its llms.txt?
Buy
- The purchase worked. Why is this reported at all?
- Is a quantity stepper not an add to cart?
- Does Ottom actually try to pay?
- Can a checkout hosted by my platform still block agents?
- Must we drop accounts for loyalty points to let agents buy?
- Why does an agent not just create an account?
- Is forced account creation the same as asking for an email?
- Our wallets convert well. Why add a checkout button?
- Why does the agent not just press Shop Pay or PayPal?
- Do I have to remove the checkout CAPTCHA for agents?
- Can an agent solve a CAPTCHA?
- Could Ottom’s agent have caused the checkout error?
- Why is an intermittent checkout error rated critical?
- Is a hover only picker an accessibility or agent problem?
- Is a hover only swatch picker common in store themes?
- Does fixing variant pickers mean we stop using JavaScript?
- Do JavaScript only variant options hurt search rankings?
- Our popup converts well. Should we remove it for agents?
- Can a cookie banner stop an AI agent from buying?
- Why is a cart that needs JavaScript medium, not critical?
- Is a fetch based cart a problem for AI agents?
- Why does my store refuse the cart but not the product page?
- Is a refused add to cart the same as needing JavaScript?
- We sell alcohol. Do we have to remove our age check?
- Why does the agent not just type a date of birth?
- Is it a stall when only a capable AI agent gets through?
- Why fix something an AI agent already got past?
- Why is a store that sells only the default size not a stall?
- Should we stop preselecting a variant?
- Why is a popup the agent closed a finding at all?
- Do I have to remove my cookie banner?
- Our checkout works when we test it. Why is this reported?
- Why is this rated medium when the purchase went through?
- Does a minimum order lower my score?
- Why does the agent not just add another item?
- Does nothing to buy lower my score?
- Why did the scan pick products that were sold out?
Evaluate
- Why does the product page open for me but not for the agent?
- Could this be a fault in the scan rather than in my store?
- Why is my price reported missing when it shows on the page?
- Does a price range count as price data for agents?
- Can I leave out availability to avoid showing low stock?
- How should I mark preorder and backorder availability?
- Does a policy published as a PDF count as readable?
- How much policy detail does an AI agent need?
- Is missing variant data the same as a broken size picker?
- Do I need variant markup on the page if it is in the feed?
- Is an old feed a problem if my catalogue rarely changes?
- How fresh does a product feed need to be?
- What identifier do I use if my products have no barcodes?
- Do missing GTINs stop an agent buying, or only finding us?
Compare
- When feed and page prices differ, which should win?
- Is a feed that lags sale prices by minutes a problem?
- Our shipping rates are complicated. What do we publish?
- Does hiding shipping costs lose sales or only annoy people?
- Can good site search replace a category structure?
- How granular should store categories be for agents?
Not here? The stall library covers every way a scan can report a store, and the glossary defines the vocabulary.