SellToAgents

Checklist · Updated July 2026 · 8 min read

The 10-step agentic-commerce readiness checklist

Ordered by impact-per-hour. Steps 1–5 cost nothing but time and cover ~80% of what AI agents need. Each step includes how to verify it worked.

1. Unblock AI crawlers in robots.txt

The single most common failure: a blanket bot-blocking rule (often shipped by a security plugin or CDN preset) silently blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot — removing you from every AI shopping channel at once.

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /

Verify: open yourstore.com/robots.txt and confirm none of those agents is disallowed — or run a free AgentReady scan which checks all seven at once.

2. Add Product + Offer JSON-LD to every product page

This is the data agents actually parse for price, currency and availability:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "Alpine Trail Running Shoe",
  "sku": "ATR-042",
  "description": "Wide-fit trail shoe, 8mm drop, vegan materials.",
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "price": "119.00",
    "priceCurrency": "USD",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
    "shippingDetails": { "@type": "OfferShippingDetails" }
  }
}

Verify: Google Rich Results Test, or view-source and search for application/ld+json.

3. Add Organization schema to your homepage

Agents prefer merchants they can identify. Name, logo, URL, contact point, same-as links to your social profiles.

4. Publish llms.txt

A curated markdown file at /llms.txt that tells agents what you sell, your best pages, and your policies. Full template in our 20-minute llms.txt guide.

5. Publish and declare an XML sitemap

Ship /sitemap.xml and declare it in robots.txt (Sitemap: https://yourstore.com/sitemap.xml) so crawlers find every product page, not just the ones your nav links to.

6. Write extractable product copy

• State facts as facts: dimensions, materials, compatibility, weight — in text, not only in images.
• Front-load the answer: first paragraph should say what it is, who it's for, and the price point.
• Kill "lifestyle-only" descriptions. Agents can't parse vibes.

7. Publish an FAQ with FAQPage schema

Shipping times, returns, sizing, warranty, "does it work with X" — FAQ markup is among the most-cited structures in AI-generated answers.

8. Clean up your product feed

Your Merchant Center / Shopify feed doubles as your agent-facing catalog. Fix: missing GTINs, stale availability, truncated titles, inconsistent variants.

9. Make policies machine-readable

Return window, shipping costs and delivery estimates as structured data (MerchantReturnPolicy, shippingDetails). Agents increasingly filter by "free returns" and "arrives by" constraints.

10. Monitor monthly

New crawlers appear, plugins rewrite robots.txt, themes drop schema in redesigns. Re-scan monthly and after every site change. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity to recommend products in your category and note whether you appear — that's your citation share, the metric that replaces rankings.