Frequently asked questions

Two things: whether your products pass Google Merchant Center's product data rules — what gets items disapproved or throttled in Google Shopping — and whether AI shopping agents like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode can read your products' facts. Every check is listed on the checks page.

No access at all. We read only public pages — the same things Google's crawler and AI agents see. We never log in, install anything or change your store.

Any Shopify store, including headless storefronts built on Shopify. When a storefront doesn't expose Shopify's public product endpoints, we read each product page's structured data instead and list the checks that leaves open. Other platforms aren't supported yet.

The audit and the five fixed products are free. If you want your whole catalog fixed and kept clean as products change, we'll talk about that separately.

Merchant Center reports what it disapproved after you've submitted a feed, and only for Google. The audit reads your public storefront before anything is submitted, covers AI shopping agents as well, and rebuilds your worst products for you.

Whenever your theme, apps or product data change — those are what usually break structured data. Audits are free; the same store is served from a 24-hour cache, so run it again the next day to see changes.

A shopper can understand a nice photo and two sentences of copy. An agent answering “merino sweater under €100, machine-washable” needs those facts as structured attributes. If they're missing, it recommends a store that has them.

How much of a product's buying information an AI shopping agent can read without guessing: structured data that's in the page without running JavaScript, every variant described with its own price and stock, and facts like material, size and care published as attributes rather than buried in prose. The score runs from 0 to 100; 80 and above is good.

Mostly not. Google renders JavaScript eventually, but most AI crawlers read the HTML as it's downloaded. If a theme or app injects your product structured data with a script, those crawlers see a page without it. The audit flags every product where that happens.

That depends on which ones. Blocking training crawlers such as GPTBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot or CCBot is a policy choice and doesn't remove you from shopping answers. Blocking the search and assistant crawlers — OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot — does, because they're what fetch your pages when a shopper asks for a recommendation. The audit checks your robots.txt for both.

The causes we find most often: invalid or missing GTINs, prices or availability in the page's structured data that don't match what the store actually charges or has in stock, missing apparel attributes (color, size, gender, age group), undersized images and promotional text in titles. Each issue in a report says which Merchant Center rule it breaks and how to fix it.

A GTIN is the global barcode number — UPC, EAN or ISBN — that identifies a product across sellers. Google uses it to match your item to the right product, and branded products without one get limited reach. If a product genuinely has no GTIN, such as a custom or handmade item, leave the barcode field empty rather than entering a SKU, and submit identifier_exists = no in your feed.

For each of your five lowest-scoring products: corrected JSON-LD (a schema.org ProductGroup with every variant, its GTIN, price and stock), Shopify metafieldsSet input for the attributes, and Merchant Center feed rows as CSV. Facts we can't verify from your photos and copy are left blank and listed, never guessed.

No. The audit only reads public pages, and the fixes are files you download and apply yourself — or ask us to apply across your whole catalog.

We use it to send you your report and, at most, one follow-up. We don't sell it or add you to a newsletter. Privacy details.

Yes. Email hello@catalogaudit.app and we'll unlist it.