Most merchant websites are built for humans, and to some extent for Google. Pretty product pages, plenty of marketing content. An AI crawler doesn’t care about any of that. To a machine deciding whether it can stake a recommendation on your catalogue, most of it is noise.
So what does the destination look like — a store that AI engines can read, trust and cite? Here’s the anatomy, piece by piece. Use it as a checklist.
Four discovery files at the root
- robots.txt — advertises the sitemap so any crawler hitting the root knows where to start, and allows the citation bots you actually want reading you.
- llms.txt — a short summary telling an LLM what the site contains: the top products, best sellers, most important pages.
- llms-full.txt — the same idea at length. Enough context and detail that a model can answer a basic question about the store without crawling further.
- agents.md — instructions for AI agents: what to do, where to go, what’s allowed, what to look for. On Shopify this is now the canonical file.
Each file routes a different kind of crawler to the same enriched content. They must agree with each other — a discovery layer that contradicts itself is worse than none.
A catalogue feed on your own domain
Mirroring the XML sitemap: stable, predictable URLs listing every product with last-updated timestamps. Machines reward predictability; a feed that lives on your own domain keeps the authority yours.
Products that answer at every depth of intent
Shoppers ask at three depths — broad (“I need a new pair of slip-ons”), mid (“waterproof leather slip-ons for travel”) and ultra-specific (“premium slip-ons, vegan-leather upper, arch support”). A GEO-optimised product page carries content for each depth: an overview paragraph, structured attributes, honest pricing and availability, usage guidance, FAQs, breadcrumbs, and the full JSON-LD an engine needs to ground a citation. One page, answering the question however precisely it’s asked.
A parallel markdown surface
A clean machine-readable version of each product — something like /llm/{product}.md — that an LLM can read directly without wading through the HTML. Cleaner, faster, easier to cite from.
Enriched schema on the human-facing page itself
Most platforms emit some structured data by default. The GEO-optimised version extends it — correct offers data, review and rating markup where it exists, FAQ blocks, discovery attributes — and, critically, keeps it identical to what the visible page says. A crawler arriving directly at the product URL must get the same picture as one that came in via llms.txt. Schema that drifts from the page is a trust-destroyer.
Collection pages that mirror it all at category level
Where products share intent, the collection page carries the same kind of structured data and grounding content at group level — so an engine asked “what’s the best vegan ketchup in the UK?” can land on a coherent category surface, not just one product.
A monitoring layer over the top
None of this is set-and-forget. Catalogues drift: prices change, products retire, a rewrite quietly contradicts a spec sheet. The final piece is high-frequency checking — findings with severity, tied to the specific page or element that triggered them, rolled into a coherence score with history so you can watch it move. Plus external tracking: querying the major AI engines on a schedule against the prompts that matter for your brand, recording whether you’re cited, whether competitors are cited instead, and where the content gaps sit.
The point
That’s the destination. What your platform lets you ship determines the path — Shopify and WooCommerce each have their own routes — but it doesn’t change what the picture looks like. Every piece serves the same goal: when an AI reads your store, it finds one consistent, structured, checkable story about what you sell and who it’s for.
Building and maintaining all of this by hand is possible. Doing it across a full catalogue, and keeping it in sync as the catalogue changes, is what Geoffy is for. Optimise — the engineering layer — is generally available today on Shopify and WordPress / WooCommerce; Monitor and Influence are in early access.
See which pieces your store already has — and which are missing: get your free GEO Score.