100 DTC Shopify stores, ranked by AI-agent readiness

Methodology

Five public-data signals, total 100 points. Each one is something an AI agent (ChatGPT Shopping, Perplexity Shopping, Google AI Mode) needs in order to discover or confirm a product — the bare minimum to be picked, before any of the more advanced 13 signals (GTIN, metafields, review markup, etc.) come into play.

Public product feed (/products.json) — 25 pts

Shopify exposes every product as JSON at /products.json by default. Many AI agents and price comparators read this first. We pass the check if a request returns valid JSON with at least one product. Many DTC brands explicitly block this path or run on a non-Shopify platform — both make them invisible to scrapers that depend on it.

Product schema.org JSON-LD on PDP — 30 pts

Structured data on the product detail page tells an AI assistant the price, availability, GTIN, and brand without scraping the rendered HTML. Google's AI Mode and Perplexity Shopping use this to confirm what a page is selling.

Valid sitemap.xml — 15 pts

The on-ramp every crawler uses to discover new products. Missing or malformed sitemaps mean newly added products take days or weeks to be indexed.

Open Graph tags on homepage — 15 pts

Three tags checked: og:title, og:description, og:image. Used by social previews and a number of AI agents to summarize a brand. We award full credit for all three, partial for two, etc.

Open robots.txt — 15 pts

We check that User-agent: * doesn't blanket-disallow /, /products, /products.json, or /collections. A few stores block exactly these paths, then wonder why nothing surfaces in AI search.

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; CatalogScanBot/0.1; +https://catalogscan.com/bot). All checks are on public, unauthenticated endpoints. No login or API key was used.