Is your Shopify store blocking AI crawlers?
Which AI crawlers exist, what blocking each one actually does, how to check your robots.txt in a minute, and how to fix it safely on Shopify.
Updated 18 October 2026 · 5 minute read
Your store's robots.txt file tells crawlers which pages they may read. Google describes it as telling crawlers which URLs they can access on your site. If it tells AI search crawlers to stay out, they do, and you won't appear in their answers.
The crawlers that matter, and what blocking each does
| Crawler | What it's for | If you block it |
|---|---|---|
OAI-SearchBot | ChatGPT search | OpenAI says blocked sites “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers” |
ChatGPT-User | Visits a page when someone asks ChatGPT about it | OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply, as these visits are started by a person |
GPTBot | Training OpenAI's models | Your content isn't used for training. It doesn't affect ChatGPT search |
PerplexityBot | Perplexity search results | Perplexity recommends allowing it if you want to appear in its results |
Googlebot, Bingbot | Google and Bing search (Bing also feeds Microsoft Copilot) | Your pages can't be read for search |
The useful distinction: blocking a training crawler like GPTBot is a reasonable choice that doesn't hide you from AI search. Blocking a search crawler like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot does.
Check yours in a minute
- Open
yourstore.com.au/robots.txtin your browser. - Look for lines that name one of the crawlers above under
User-agent:, followed byDisallow: /. That blocks the whole store for that crawler.
Shopify's default robots.txt doesn't block these crawlers. Shopify says the default is optimal for SEO and mainly keeps crawlers out of admin, cart, checkout and account pages. Blocks usually come from a custom edit, an app, or a bot-protection service in front of the store.
Fixing it safely
On Shopify, custom robots.txt rules live in a theme template called robots.txt.liquid. Shopify is blunt about the risk: it says Shopify Support can't help with edits to this file, and that “incorrect use of the feature can result in loss of all traffic.” Have a developer remove the specific blocking lines, leave everything else alone, and recheck the file afterwards.
One more thing to check while you're there: robots.txt isn't how you hide pages from Google. Google says it “is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google”. That job belongs to a noindex setting, so make sure your product pages don't have one.
What this does and doesn't do
Unblocking the search crawlers means AI assistants can read your pages. It doesn't guarantee they'll recommend you, and nobody can promise that. It does remove the one problem that rules you out completely.
Your next step
Run the free inspection on one of your product pages. It checks ai agent access and seven other things AI assistants and Google read, and tells you what to fix in plain English. If you'd rather not do it yourself, we can do it all with the Agent-Ready Setup ($595).