Why ecommerce sites need a different reading of the same checks
An online store repeats a handful of templates across thousands of URLs, so a single template problem becomes thousands of problems. Faceted navigation multiplies URLs, product feeds change daily, and most of the text on a category page is navigation. The audit does not change what it measures for a store; it changes what matters. A missing canonical on a blog post is a notice. A missing canonical on a filtered category page is how a site ends up with 40,000 indexed near-duplicates.
The second shift is where shopping research happens now. Google says its AI features use normal Googlebot crawling and need no special markup, but they still need the page to be crawlable, snippet-eligible and readable without JavaScript. ChatGPT search uses OAI-SearchBot; Perplexity uses PerplexityBot. A store that blocks those bots in robots.txt or behind bot protection is absent from those answers no matter how good its Google rankings are. The AI visibility category scores exactly those conditions.
What this audit looks at for ecommerce sites
The audit runs the same 60+ checks as the main tool. The items below are the ones that most often decide the outcome for this kind of site, with the fix we recommend.
- Faceted navigation and parameter URLs
- Filter and sort parameters create thousands of near-duplicate URLs. The audit checks canonical tags, robots directives and whether the page you enter is itself a parameter variant that should point elsewhere.
- Product and offer structured data
- Product pages need Product JSON-LD with offers, price, availability and, where genuine, aggregateRating. The audit parses every JSON-LD block, flags syntax errors and reports which types are present.
- Thin category pages
- Category pages that are only a grid of products give search engines and AI systems little to work with. The audit measures extractable text and whether the page answers the questions buyers ask.
- Core Web Vitals on product pages
- Image-heavy pages often fail LCP and CLS. The audit pulls real-user Chrome data where it exists and Lighthouse lab data otherwise, then lists the biggest savings.
- AI crawler access and snippet eligibility
- Shopping answers in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI features depend on OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot being allowed and on snippets not being blocked. The audit tests robots rules and fetches the page as those crawlers.
- Out-of-stock and discontinued products
- Pages that return 404 or redirect to the homepage lose link equity and confuse crawlers. The audit reports status codes and redirect chains for the URL you test.
Frequently asked questions
- Should I audit the homepage or a product page?
- Both, separately. The homepage shows site-level problems (robots.txt, sitemap, security headers, crawler access). A product or category page shows the template-level issues that repeat across thousands of URLs.
- Does the audit crawl my whole store?
- This audit analyzes one page plus site-level files. The website audit tool crawls multiple pages and finds duplicate titles, missing descriptions and noindex pages across the site.
- Which platforms does it work with?
- Any platform that serves HTML: Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and custom builds. Platform-specific notes for Shopify are on the Shopify SEO audit page.
- Can it see prices and inventory?
- It reads what is in the HTML, including Product structured data. It does not log in, add to cart or evaluate pricing strategy.