AI shopping assistants came looking for this brand. All they found was "not found."
Large home goods brand · Home Goods
Every one came back "not found."
AI shopping assistants won't do that. They stop at the brand's main website.
We checked again four days later. Nothing had changed.
Before an AI shopping assistant can shop a store, it looks for a few files on the store's website. On this brand's website, every one came back "not found."
The brand is a large home goods company that sells on Shopify. It has its own custom website, built on top of Shopify.
The files that welcome AI
Shopify sets up a few special files for every store. They tell AI shopping assistants how to shop there: how to search the products and where to ask questions.
On most Shopify stores, these files sit at the store's main web address. That's the first place an AI assistant looks.
What we found
- Not found at the main address. We looked for the files on the brand's main website. Every one came back "not found."
- They were somewhere else. The files did exist, on a different web address that shoppers never see.
- AI can't be sent there. The rules AI shopping assistants follow say to trust these files only at the brand's own web address. Even if the brand's website pointed AI to the other address, AI isn't allowed to go there.
- Finding them took digging. We only found them by searching through the website's code. An AI assistant won't do that.
To be fair
The brand's products can still reach some AI assistants another way. Shopify shares product details with ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini directly. But any AI assistant that starts from the brand's own website, the way AI shopping is meant to work, finds nothing.
Why this matters
This kind of gap is easy to miss. The website works fine for people, and nothing looks broken. But when AI comes to the front door, it finds nothing and moves on.
Brands with custom websites are the most likely to have this problem, because their website and their Shopify store live in different places.
What we can't say yet
We checked twice, four days apart. We didn't track sales before and after. What we can say is what AI could and couldn't find when we looked.
Is this happening on your store?
If your website was custom-built, this is worth checking. Run the free check to see what AI can find on your store.
