2026-09-27

Is my WooCommerce store visible in ChatGPT? A checklist you can run today

Short answer: probably not fully, and you can find out in about ten minutes. Since 24 March 2026, eligible Shopify stores have been discoverable in ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Google's AI Mode by default, with no setup (Shopify's announcement). WooCommerce has no equivalent built in yet: its AI and agentic commerce roadmap talks about product feeds and agentic checkout, but no native ChatGPT integration is shipped or dated.

That doesn't mean WooCommerce products can't appear. It means nothing does it for you. This checklist covers what AI shopping agents need from your store, in the order it usually goes wrong, with a command you can run for each check.

How ChatGPT finds products in the first place

There are three ways an AI assistant learns about a product:

1. Its search index. OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot crawls the web to power ChatGPT search results, including shopping answers. Anthropic (Claude-SearchBot) and Perplexity (PerplexityBot) run their own. If they can't fetch and understand your product pages, you're not in the index.
2. Merchant product feeds. OpenAI publishes a Product Feed Spec for merchants: required fields are item_id, title, description, url, brand, seller_name, image_url, availability and price, with gtin and mpn strongly recommended.
3. Live fetches. When a shopper pastes your link or asks about your product, ChatGPT-User, Claude-User or Perplexity-User fetches the page on the spot.

All three depend on the same basics. Here they are.

1. Is the store actually live?

New WooCommerce stores start in "coming soon" mode: logged-out visitors (and crawlers) see a placeholder page, while you, logged in as admin, see the real shop. It's the most common reason a store is invisible, and it's easy to miss because it looks fine to you.

Check: open a product page in a private browser window. If you see "coming soon", go to WooCommerce → Settings → Site visibility and choose Live.

Also check Settings → Reading → "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is unticked. With it on, WordPress tells every crawler not to index the site.

2. Does robots.txt let the AI crawlers in?

Fetch your robots.txt and look for rules that name AI crawlers, or a blanket Disallow: /:

curl -s https://yourstore.com/robots.txt

The user agents that matter for shopping visibility are the search and user bots: OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User. The training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) are a separate decision: blocking them keeps your content out of model training, not out of search answers. Many stores block training and allow search; that's a legitimate choice. Blocking the search bots is what costs visibility.

3. Is a firewall blocking them anyway?

robots.txt is only half of it. Security plugins and CDNs often block AI crawlers by user agent before robots.txt is even read, and nothing in your WordPress settings shows it. Test it directly: request the same product page as a browser and as each bot, and compare the status codes.

URL=https://yourstore.com/product/your-product/
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "browser: %{http_code}\n" -A "Mozilla/5.0" "$URL"
for bot in OAI-SearchBot ChatGPT-User Claude-SearchBot PerplexityBot; do
  curl -s -o /dev/null -w "$bot: %{http_code}\n" -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; $bot/1.0)" "$URL"
done

A 200 for the browser and a 403, 406 or 429 for a bot means something is blocking that bot. One caveat: some CDNs verify bots by IP address, so a fake bot request from your laptop can be blocked even though the real crawler gets through. Treat a block here as "check your CDN and security plugin settings", not as proof.

4. Is there valid Product structured data?

AI agents and Google read the schema.org Product JSON-LD in your page to get the name, price, currency, availability, brand and identifiers without guessing. WooCommerce outputs it by default, but themes and plugins sometimes remove or break it.

curl -s https://yourstore.com/product/your-product/ | grep -o '"@type":"Product"' | head -1

No output means no Product markup. If it's there, check it includes offers.price, offers.priceCurrency, offers.availability, a gtin (or mpn) and a brand. Google's Rich Results Test shows the full parsed data.

5. Can the name and price be read without JavaScript?

Most AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. If your theme or page builder loads the title or price with JavaScript, the crawler sees an empty template.

curl -s https://yourstore.com/product/your-product/ | grep -c "Your Product Name"

Zero means the name isn't in the HTML the server sends.

6. Does every product have an identifier?

Agents match products across sellers by GTIN (the barcode number: UPC, EAN, ISBN) or by brand plus MPN. Google Merchant Center requires the GTIN whenever the manufacturer assigned one (product data spec), and OpenAI's feed spec recommends it. WooCommerce 9.2+ has a built-in "GTIN, UPC, EAN, or ISBN" field on every product and variation. Most catalogs have it half-filled. We wrote a separate guide on missing GTINs and how to fix them.

7. Does every product have a brand?

Brand is a required field in OpenAI's feed spec and required by Google for new products. WooCommerce 9.6+ includes a Brands taxonomy (Products → Brands). Your own products get your own brand.

8. Are variations complete?

A variable product whose variations are set to "Any size" or "Any colour" leaves an agent unable to say what the shopper would get. Each variation needs its own price, stock status, attribute values and, ideally, its own GTIN.

9. Does the Store API answer?

The WooCommerce Store API is the public, read-only product endpoint that headless tools and agents can use:

curl -s "https://yourstore.com/wp-json/wc/store/v1/products?per_page=1" | head -c 300

You should see JSON. An error or an HTML page usually means a security plugin is blocking /wp-json/.

10. Can a shopper check out as a guest?

Agents buying on someone's behalf struggle with mandatory account creation. Turn on WooCommerce → Settings → Accounts & Privacy → "Allow customers to place orders without an account".

Lower priority: llms.txt and UCP

• llms.txt is a Markdown file at /llms.txt that summarises your site for language models (llmstxt.org). It's new and lightly used; worth a few minutes, not a weekend.
• UCP (the Universal Commerce Protocol) lets agents discover your checkout capabilities from a profile at /.well-known/ucp. It needs a checkout integration that implements it; nothing in WooCommerce core provides one yet. Watch it; don't lose sleep over it.
• WooCommerce MCP (added in 10.3) lets AI assistants help you manage the store. It doesn't make products visible to shoppers.

Running all ten at once

We built a free WordPress plugin that runs these checks from inside your store: LeyMish AI Shopping Readiness. Under WooCommerce → AI Readiness it gives a 0–100 score, a fix list ordered by how many points each fix is worth, and a CSV of every product's gaps. It runs entirely on your site: its only requests go to your own store's pages, it needs no account, and it sends nothing anywhere.

What it can't do is promise you a spot in ChatGPT. OpenAI, Google and the others decide what they show. What the checklist does is remove the reasons they'd leave you out.