What AI shopping readiness means when you open the store.

Readiness for AI shopping sounds like a project. On a Shopify store it is mostly a set of checks against pages and settings you already have, and each check has a documented right answer. This post lays them out as seven days of work, one hour or less each, with the platform and legal facts you need beside every step.

Nothing here requires a developer except one step, and that one step comes with a warning from Shopify itself.

Day one: policies a shopper and a machine can both read

Open Settings, then Policies, in your Shopify admin. Shopify lets you add six types: return, privacy, terms of service, shipping, legal notice and subscription. A button labelled Insert template fills the box with a default. The templates are generated only in English for English language checkouts, and Shopify points to generators in French, Italian and Spanish for some others.

Shopify links these automatically in several places. Policies appear in the footer of your checkout pages, return policy links appear on order review pages, and shipping policy links appear on product pages and carts. Each policy also has its own address, such as /policies/refund-policy, so you can link to it from menus and from product descriptions.

Read the result as a customer would, on a phone, from the footer of a product page. Click the returns link. Does it open a page with a number of days in it, or a block of legal wording with no number? Click the shipping link and see whether it names a cost and a delivery time. A policy page that answers those two questions in the first paragraph serves a shopper and any software summarising your store.

Shopify adds a warning that matters more than the template: although it can generate templates, you are responsible for following your published policies. A template that promises a 30 day returns window you do not honour is a liability, and it is also a statement a shopper or an assistant may quote back to you. Edit the template until every sentence is true of your business, then add the specifics a shopper wants: the returns window, who pays for return delivery, delivery times by region.

Day two: the sitemap and robots.txt

Shopify says all stores automatically generate a sitemap.xml file. It sits at the root of each domain, for example example.com/sitemap.xml, and holds links to your products, the primary product image, pages, collections and blog posts. It updates when you add a product, page, collection, image or blog post. Stores on Basic plans and above that use international domains get a separate sitemap for each domain.

The one documented way to break it is private mode. Shopify states that a sitemap reader such as Google cannot access the sitemap if your website is set to private mode. A store left behind a password after a relaunch is invisible to every crawler, including the ones that serve shopping assistants.

Then read your robots.txt at yourstore.com/robots.txt. Shopify's default blocks the admin, the cart, checkout, account pages and sorted collection pages, which avoids duplicate content, and allows crawlers to request your public content such as products and blog posts. That default is sensible for most shops.

Shopify's documentation gives the reasons for each default line. Allow: / lets crawlers request public content. Disallow: /admin keeps admin pages out. Disallow: /cart/ keeps cart links out, because they are specific to one customer. None of those rules needs your attention. The risk is an old edit, made to block one crawler, that stayed in place after everyone forgot it.

If you have never touched it, leave it. If someone did, read it for a stray Disallow line that blocks the whole shop or a crawler you want.

Day three: a complete product record

Google Merchant Center sets out the clearest definition of a complete record. Seven attributes are required for every product: an ID, a title of up to 150 characters, a description of up to 5,000 characters, a link, an image link, availability and price. Brand is required for new products, and apparel needs more, including colour and age group in some markets. You do not need Merchant Center to use this as a checklist. Open your ten best selling products and check each has all seven in a form a person would find useful. A spreadsheet works well for this: one row per product, one column per attribute, and every empty cell is a gap to close.

Titles are the usual weak point. A title that says Classic Tee works for a theme that shows a photo beside it and fails for a system that sees only text. Put the type of product, the main attribute and the brand into the title, within the 150 character limit.

Description is the second weak point. The limit is 5,000 characters and the aim is to use some of that on facts: what it is made of, its dimensions, what it fits, how to care for it, what is in the box. Write sentences a customer could read aloud. A product with a two line description and a long list of tags has the facts in the wrong place.

Check identifiers while you are there. Google says to submit a GTIN, the number under the barcode, only if you are sure it is correct, and not to guess or make one up. GTINs run to 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits depending on the format, and the check digit must be present and correct. A product with no manufacturer number, such as your own brand, takes a brand and an MPN instead and leaves the GTIN empty.

Variants have limits you should know

Shopify allows up to 2,048 variants on one product and up to three options, such as size, colour and material. Its help centre also warns that products above 100 variants may run into trouble, because some third party themes do not support more than 100 variants and similar limits apply to some theme extensions and apps. If you sell one product in four sizes, six colours and three materials, you have 72 variants, well inside the limit. Past three options you need an app or custom code, and each workaround is one more place for price and stock to disagree.

Days four and five: images and product attributes

Day four: alt text

Alt text is the written description of an image. The W3C accessibility guidance says the text alternative has to be determined by the author depending on the usage, context and content of the image, and that for an informative image it should be at least a short description conveying the main information the image presents.

For a product photo, that means saying what a person would need to know: the item, its colour, and what the angle shows. A file name such as IMG_1234 conveys nothing. A sentence such as a navy waterproof trail shoe, side view, showing the grip sole conveys three facts. Screen reader users depend on it, and so does any system that reads the page as text. Start with your ten best sellers, and write each description for that picture and not for the product in general.

Day five: metafields and category attributes

Metafields are fields you add to products for facts that the standard form has no box for, such as material, care instructions or compatibility. Shopify says to use a standard metafield definition whenever you can, because standard definitions are automatically configured and follow standards used across all Shopify stores, so they are supported by apps, themes and other parts of the store.

A second kind is tied to Shopify's standard product taxonomy. Shopify calls these category metafields, and the taxonomy calls them product attributes. Their stated purpose is to make products more discoverable on your site, on marketplaces and on search engines. Shopify's example is a shirt: once the product has a category, you can add clothing size, neckline and sleeve length type, each with preset options you can rename. Some are added automatically from predictions, others are suggested for you to adopt, and you can link them to variant options.

Set the category on every product first, because the attributes follow from it. Then fill the attributes that answer questions your customers send you.

The same facts can live in three places: the description, a metafield and the category attributes. Duplication is fine if the three agree. Pick one as the source you edit and treat the others as copies, so that a correction in one place does not leave a stale answer in another.

Days six and seven: markup and prices

Day six: test what the page tells a machine

Google's Rich Results Test is a free tool. You enter a public page address or paste HTML, and it reports which rich results the structured data on that page can produce, with results from both a smartphone and a desktop view.

Run it on one product page of each type: a simple product, a product with variants, a product that is sold out and one on sale. Check that the price, currency and availability it reads match what the page shows. Google's structured data policy says not to mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page, and says a structured data issue can lead to a manual action, which means the page loses eligibility for rich results while its ranking stays as it was. Google also says it does not guarantee that correct markup will show in search results, so treat the test as a way to find errors, not as a promise of placement.

A clean result and a correct page are different things. The test tells you whether the markup parses and which result types it qualifies for. It does not tell you that the price is right. Compare the numbers by eye, once, on the products you sell most, and again after any theme update.

Day seven: prices and VAT

The Price Marking Order 2004 defines the selling price as the final price to be paid for a unit of a product, or a given quantity of it, including VAT and all other taxes, excluding any deposit. Article 4 of the Order says that where a trader indicates that a product is or may be for sale to a consumer, the trader shall indicate the selling price. For a UK shop selling to consumers, the price a shopper sees on the product page therefore has to be the price with VAT in it.

Google's data rules point the same way. Outside the United States and Canada, Merchant Center asks for the product price including VAT or GST, and it names the United Kingdom among the countries where that applies. The amount and currency must match the landing page and the checkout. Shipping belongs in shipping settings and not in the product price.

So check three places on one product: the price on the page, the price in the checkout, and the price in any feed or markup. They should be the same number, and for a UK consumer shop that number includes VAT.

Run it on the store you have

The readiness scan runs in the BYOM Shopify app, on a store that has installed it. It reads through Shopify with your permission. Each confirmed change is recorded.