Get your Shopify store in AI search results

AI is everywhere and like it or not, we can't ignore it. You don't have to use it if you don't want to, but your customers may be.

So it's important to understand how you can get your Shopify store to show up in AI search results.

Your focus should not just be on Google AI though they are still the number one search engine.

In Google Analytics, I'm starting to see more visibility and traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Shopify's AI, and the like. Each with their own algorithm and method of displaying results based on the users query.

The biggest trick with AI is that it's constantly changing. So what works today, may not work tomorrow. And what works for one site, may not work for you. So please take the following with a grain of salt.

What AI tools want for shopping queries

Naturally, Google's docs are the most complete when addressing how to show up in their AI features.

My biggest takeaway from Google is that all your normal SEO efforts are still very relevant and essential to showing up in AI Overviews. More on that in a moment.

Shopify's release of the Shopify Catalog API provided some hints of their integrations with Perplexity, ChatGPT and Copilot. Unfortunately, Shopify has an invite-only integration with Perplexity to test how all this will work. So our visibility into this is very limited.

Since Shopify's announcement, it's been fairly quiet from Shopify on the AI shopping experience, but that's to be expected.

ChatGPT announced their shopping experience and mentioned an integration with Shopify even though Shopify hasn't said a peep.

This is what we know works so far:

Structured Data

Bing hasn't updated their structured data docs in years. Yet they recently published a blog that calls out adding essential product structured data.

To maximize indexing and visibility, we recommend including:

• title (name in JSON-LD)
• description
• price (list/retail price)
• link (product landing page URL)
• image link (image in JSON-LD)
• shipping (especially important for Germany and Austria)
• id (a unique identifier for the product)
• brand
• gtin
• mpn
• datePublished
• dateModified

Optional fields to further enhance context and classification:

• category (helps group products for search and shopping platforms)
• seller (recommended for marketplaces or resellers)
• itemCondition (e.g., NewCondition, UsedCondition)

In their help article, OpenAI goes on to say "Structured metadata from third-party providers (e.g., price, product description) and other third-party content (e.g., reviews)" will be considered in "determining which products to surface."

We know structured data plays a part in getting into results and how merchants are selected, but they don't necessarily impact rankings.

Which means ChatGPT may not show your product simply because you have structured data.

How they decide which product to show first (if at all) is still a bit of a mystery. Not that I expect them to spill their secrets.

I expect to see updates at some point with how to send a product feed of sorts to ChatGPT and or Perplexity. Unless of course they get all the information they need from the structured data. Time will tell.

Google has continued to encourage structured data and the use of ProductGroup markup for products with variants. From a shopping perspective, that is still the gold standard and the recommended product markup for all ecommerce stores.

Outside of the normal structured data that Google uses for their Rich Results program, there is no special schema.org structured data that you need to add for their AI features.

IndexNow

IndexNow allows websites to notify search engines of new, changed, and deleted content. This also reduces the dependency on more traditional crawling where it's up to the search engine to crawl your site. Instead, you are in the driver seat and notify the search engine when something has changed.

The theory is that by using IndexNow, search engines will index your pages more quickly. Note that not all search engines use the IndexNow protocol. So far, we know Microsoft Bing, Yandex, and a few others use IndexNow but Google does not currently use the IndexNow protocol.

One important piece is that you should only publish an update to IndexNow when URLs change (adding, updating, or deleting content) from when you start to use IndexNow. That means if you have old content that hasn't been touched recently, those shouldn't be sent to IndexNow.

Does IndexNow work with Shopify

According to Bing, Shopify already supports IndexNow. You do not need another app for IndexNow nor do you need to set this up manually yourself.

Shopify has yet to publish any documentation that states they support IndexNow natively, but Shopify Support confirmed they do.

The challenge is that it's difficult to verify and validate that your IndexNow feed is working.

Usually I would say if Shopify hasn't announced the integration, I wouldn't trust it. But given that the source is Bing directly, I'm going to trust Bing. They wouldn't announce an integration that isn't there.

Make sure AI bots can access your content

Don't block OpenAI's search crawler.

About a year or so ago, there was a lot of talk about limiting AI bots from accessing your site in fear of stealing your content.

If you blocked any AI bots in your robots.txt file, you may consider allowing AI bots again if showing up in AI search results is important to you.

You don't have to explicitly allow bots like OAI-SearchBot to your robots.txt file. It's assumed that all User-agents have access unless you state otherwise. As long as you didn't disallow the bot, you are good to go.

Don't depend on JavaScript to display critical content.

Key content should be available in the HTML.

Many AI bots struggle to use JavaScript which means if the content requires JavaScript to show up, AI bots may not see that content. Google, arguably one of the companies with the most expertise of seeing what's on the page, only started to accept some JavaScript a few years ago.

After years of research and development in Google, their bots can now run most JavaScript so that your content can show up on the page. It's doubtful if these AI companies can read anywhere near as much JavaScript as Google and browsers themselves.

So you'll need to decide if the benefits of using JavaScript to show content outweighs the risks of not showing up in AI search results.

LLMS.txt

The LLMS.txt file is a proposed standard, similar to the sitemap.xml and robots.txt file, that is supposed to help LLMs crawl and discover your website content.

The idea is that you create a file with your most important pages that you want LLMs to crawl. For ecommerce sites, that likely means your best selling products or collection pages.

In theory, this sounds like a no-brainer.

But this moment in time, there's mostly a lot of hype on creating the LLMS.txt file with little proof that it actually works.

The LLMS.txt file is experimental and not widely utilized by AI bots for their search results. Maybe at some point, but not yet.

The biggest challenge I see with LLMS.txt files is that you aren't just sending URLs like you do with a sitemap.

This is more of a marketing exercise that includes a short summary of your site, links, link names and a brief description of the link. So it's not a quick process.

That's not even addressing the issue of maintaining the file which you'd need to do as you add or remove products from your site.

Decide for yourself if it's worth the effort to create and maintain the LLMS.txt file.

For me, until I know the LLMS.txt file is actually being used, I'm not spending my time or resources. I'd rather invest in something I know will drive revenue.

Foundational SEO still works

Despite the millions of articles out right now saying traditional SEO is dead, I beg to differ.

Yes, there are some traditional SEO tactics that no longer work and haven't worked for years. But that doesn't mean you should abandon all your normal SEO efforts.

• Create great content that is relevant to what your customers are searching for. Content is still the main driver for all search engines.
• Make sure you're set up in Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Continue to create internal links across your site which can boost discovery of other pages.
• Make sure your content is in the HTML. Don't depend on your images to communicate for you. Think of images and videos as supporting your written content.
• Get others talking about your products and get high quality backlinks.
• Prevent dead end pages and redirect old URLs to relevant products.
• Include structured data that is relevant to the page.

Be sure to review the Shopify SEO guide for other ideas.

If you haven't already, make sure you sign up to be notified when feed submissions open up on ChatGPT. And if you are a large retailer interested in working with Perplexity, sign up to learn more about their program.

Not sure if your structured data is up to snuff, contact me for a free structured data audit. Customers of JSON-LD for SEO are already set and no action is needed.

As with all SEO efforts, there is never a guarantee that if you do all the things, you'll show up in search results. It just doesn't work that way and never will. If you get stuck, pick one thing and work on that. Start small and slowly work on other SEO efforts as time permits.