Questions to ask your e-commerce platform about AI agents

Your e-commerce platform makes many agent readiness decisions before you touch a setting: what robots.txt says, which bots get challenged, how product pages are built and whether checkout needs an account. Here are the questions to put to your platform's account manager or support team, why each one matters, and what a good answer sounds like.

Why start with your platform

On a hosted platform, much of what an AI agent meets on your site is set by the platform, not by you. On a self-hosted one, it's set by the platform's defaults plus whatever your developers, theme and plugins changed. Either way, it pays to know which parts you control and which you can only ask about.

Ask in writing and keep the answers. They tell you where to spend effort, and any agency you hire will want them too.

• Access robots.txt, bot protection, CAPTCHAs
• Product data What's in the HTML, structured data
• Checkout Guest option, challenges, field labels
• Protocols Agentic checkout, MCP, llms.txt
• Logs Who visited, what they got back

Access and bot protection

Platforms often run their own bot protection in front of every store, and you may not see its settings at all.

Ask	Why it matters	A good answer sounds like
Who writes our robots.txt, and can we change it?	A rule that blocks AI assistants or AI search keeps you out of their answers.	"We generate a default, here's what it blocks, and here's how you add or remove rules without losing future updates."
What bot protection sits in front of our store, and what do verified AI assistants get?	A challenge page is a dead end for most assistants, which don't run scripts.	"Verified search and assistant traffic is let through. Unverified automation is challenged. Here's the documentation."
Where do CAPTCHAs appear by default?	A CAPTCHA on arrival or at checkout stops an agent cold.	A specific list (for example contact forms and sign-in pages) and how to switch each one off.
Do you support signed agent requests (Web Bot Auth)?	Signatures let agents prove who they are when their IP addresses change.	"Yes, here's where it applies", or "not yet, and here's what we use instead".

If you run your own CDN or bot product in front of the platform, ask that vendor too. We cover those in questions to ask your CDN or bot protection vendor.

Rendering and product data

Most AI crawlers and assistant fetchers read the HTML your server sends and never run JavaScript. If the price, stock or description only appears after scripts run, those agents don't see it. In our study of 255 stores, 63% of stores gave price, currency and availability as structured data in the product page's HTML, and 15% didn't have prices in the product page's HTML at all.

Ask	Why it matters	A good answer sounds like
Are product, category and content pages rendered on the server?	Server-rendered pages work for agents that don't run JavaScript.	"Yes, the full page is in the HTML", and a note on any parts (reviews, recommendations) that load later.
Do product pages include Product structured data, and which fields?	Agents read price, currency and stock most reliably from structured data.	"Name, price, currency, availability and identifiers, per variant where there are variants."
What happens to structured data when apps or plugins change prices?	Sale prices or currency switchers can leave the data saying something different from the page.	"It uses the same source as the displayed price."
Is a sitemap generated, and does it list products?	Agents and crawlers use sitemaps to find product pages.	"Yes, at this address, updated when products change."

For what good product data looks like, see product data that AI shopping agents can read.

A vague answer

• "We're fully SEO-friendly."
• "Our bot protection only stops bad bots."
• "Agents are on the roadmap."

A useful answer

• "Product data is in the HTML, here's an example page."
• "Verified assistants skip challenges, here's the rule."
• "We support this protocol today, on by default."

Checkout and guest checkout

Checkout is where an agent's work turns into an order, and where platforms tend to add the most protection. In our store study, of 193 stores whose cart or checkout we could load, 2% blocked or challenged requests identifying as AI assistants there while browsers got through, and another 15% showed a CAPTCHA to every visitor.

• Can shoppers check out without an account, and is that the default? Agents can't create accounts for people. A good answer names the setting and says what it's set to for you. See guest checkout.
• Does checkout show a CAPTCHA or challenge, and when? A good answer: only for traffic that looks risky, or only during events you schedule, never on every order.
• Can we change the checkout's form fields and labels? Unlabelled fields trip agents up. A good answer says what you control and what the platform maintains.
• Does the cart work with one add-to-cart click on a product page? An add-to-cart button that only appears after a choice, or a "Buy now" button with no cart, makes it harder for agents to build a basket.

A good answer names a setting, a page or a document you can check. "We're agent-ready" isn't an answer.

Agentic commerce protocols

Agentic commerce protocols let an assistant place an order without filling in your checkout pages. Most are new, and most stores will get them through their platform or payment provider rather than build them. Our guide to agentic commerce protocols explains the main ones.

• Which protocols do you support today, and which are planned? Separate "live" from "early access" from "roadmap".
• Is it on by default, and how do we turn it off for a channel or a product? You want to know what's already switched on in your name.
• Which product data do the AI channels receive, and from where? Assistants will quote whatever price and stock they're given.
• How are agent orders marked in our orders and reports?
• Do you publish an llms.txt file, an MCP server or WebMCP tools for our store? Some platforms do this for every store. A good answer tells you the address and whether you can edit it.

Logs and data

Most AI agents don't run JavaScript, so page-tag analytics rarely see them. Server or CDN logs are how you find out which agents visit, what they read and what they got back. On a hosted platform, you may not have those logs at all.

• Can we get request logs for our store, including user agent, path and status code? A good answer: yes, by export or a log stream, and here's how.
• Do the logs say whether a request was challenged or blocked, and by which rule? That's how you find out why an assistant said it "couldn't access" your site.
• Do you report visits and sales that come from AI assistants separately?

If the platform can't give you logs, ask whether a CDN in front of the store could. See how to measure agent traffic.

Check the answers yourself

Answers describe intent. Your site shows what actually happens, so test it from the outside:

1. Send the questions In writing, to one named contact
2. Run AgentScore Compare its findings with the answers
3. Test a journey From product page to checkout
4. Follow up On any answer the results contradict

1. Run AgentScore. It requests your pages as a browser and as AI agents, loads your cart and checkout, and reports what it found against each check. Where it disagrees with an answer, ask again.
2. Send a Ghost Agent through a real journey, such as finding a product and reaching checkout. It stops before payment and gives you a step-by-step replay.
3. Repeat after major platform releases.

On Shopify or WooCommerce? Our guides to Shopify and WooCommerce answer some of these questions from each platform's own documentation.