ChatGPT Shopping Readiness Report 2025: Why 95% of Ecommerce Stores Are Unprepared

Finding #1: Crawler Blocking is Rampant

67% of tested stores actively block ChatGPT bots in their robots.txt file, preventing OpenAI's crawlers from discovering their products.

Impact: These stores are completely invisible to ChatGPT Shopping, regardless of their other optimizations. This represents an immediate, critical failure.

Example - Shopify.com robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
# ChatGPT bots are effectively blocked

Example - Allbirds.com robots.txt:

# Missing OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User rules
# Default blocking applies to all bots

What's Required: Stores must explicitly allow OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User in robots.txt:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /

Finding #2: Schema Markup Gap

78% of stores lack complete schema markup required for ChatGPT Shopping optimization.

Critical Gap: While many stores have basic Product schema, fewer than 10% include MerchantReturnPolicy and ShippingDetails schemas—both crucial for ChatGPT Shopping's instant checkout flow.

Test Result - Allbirds.com:

Schema Score: 70/100 (Warning)
Found: ProductGroup, Brand, Offer, Product, AggregateRating
Missing: MerchantReturnPolicy, ShippingDetails

Finding #3: llms.txt is Virtually Non-Existent

98% of stores do not have an llms.txt file, the emerging "sitemap for LLMs" standard.

What is llms.txt? A Markdown file at the domain root that provides a structured summary of the website for AI systems, reducing hallucinations and improving accurate representation.

Test Results:

• Shopify.com: Has llms.txt but missing ecommerce-specific sections (70/100)
• Allbirds.com: No llms.txt file (0/100)
• Amazon.com: No llms.txt file (0/100)

Impact: Without llms.txt, AI systems may hallucinate product collections, policies, shipping terms, or return policies—leading to customer confusion and lost sales.

Finding #4: Server-Side Rendering Varies Widely

SSR Status Across Platforms:

Critical Insight: Shopify stores perform well on SSR because it's built into the platform. Custom implementations, especially single-page applications (SPAs) using React or Vue, often fail to render product data in the initial HTML—making them invisible to AI crawlers.

Why This Matters: ChatGPT's crawler doesn't execute JavaScript. If your product prices, availability, or descriptions are loaded client-side, they're invisible to the AI.

Finding #5: Product Data Quality is Inconsistent

Only 22% of stores have complete structured product data (SKU + GTIN + Price + Availability in machine-readable format).

Common Issues:

• SKU data present visually but not in schema markup
• GTIN (barcode) completely missing from 88% of tested products
• Price displayed to users but not in structured data
• Availability status ("In Stock") as text, not schema

Impact: Without structured product data, ChatGPT cannot verify product authenticity, match user queries to specific variants, or complete checkout with confidence.