AI search readiness for online shops
Shoppers now ask an assistant what to buy before they ever reach a shop. Whether your products are in that answer depends on what your product pages state in machine-readable form.
Updated September 3, 2026
A shop has the raw material an answer engine wants — names, prices, availability, specifications — and usually hides most of it behind scripts, images and a filter interface. The gap between what a shopper sees and what a crawler receives is wider on shops than on any other kind of site.
The questions the engine generates
These are the shapes of question the audit builds from your own business profile, then checks your pages against. Yours are generated from your site, in your site’s language.
- Which providers for garden saunas should be compared?
- How much does a Karibu Monterey sauna house cost?
- What are the alternatives to a barrel sauna?
What the audit reads to recognise this
- Product schema: name, price, currency, availability, and whether the seller is you
- The product category, which is the term buyers actually search for
- Whether the price a shopper sees matches the price in the markup
What usually goes wrong
The price is rendered by JavaScript
A crawler that does not run scripts sees a product page with no price. Price is the single most-asked attribute in shopping questions, so this one omission removes you from most of them.
Category pages have nothing but a grid
The category page is the one that matches a category question, and on most shops it is a wall of tiles with no prose. A few honest paragraphs about choosing within that category is often the highest-value page a shop can add.
Schema claims things the page does not show
Ratings nobody left, availability that is not real, a price the page contradicts. Answer engines cross-check, and a contradiction costs more than the missing field would have.
Every variant is its own thin page
Twelve near-identical pages for twelve sizes split the evidence twelve ways. One strong page with variants marked up beats twelve weak ones.
Other site types
- AI search readiness for local businesses. When somebody asks an AI assistant for a provider in their town, the answer names a handful of businesses. Here is what decides whether yours is one of them.
- AI search readiness for comparison and finder sites. A comparison site is not a seller, and it should not be tested as one. Here is what answer engines actually ask a finder, and what decides whether it is the source they use.
- AI search readiness for SaaS and software companies. Software buyers ask assistants for shortlists and alternatives. Getting onto those lists depends on facts your marketing site usually states everywhere except in text.
- AI search readiness for service businesses and agencies. Service buyers ask assistants who does this work, who is any good, and what it costs. Most agency sites answer none of the three in a form a machine can use.
- AI search readiness for one-page sites and landing pages. A single page has one chance to say what this is, who it is for and why it is credible. Most one-pagers spend it on a slogan.
The seven signals behind the score are explained in how scoring works, and each one has a guide of its own.
Frequently asked questions
- Will AI search send me traffic or just answer for me?
- Both happen. Transactional questions still send people to a shop to buy, and answers that name a shop are how they choose which one. Being the shop named in the answer is the goal; the click follows it.
- Do I need schema on every product?
- On every product you want to be asked about. Start with the products that carry your margin, get name, price, availability and category right there first, then widen.