Fix guides
WooCommerce fixes for AI search visibility
Every guide covers one specific, machine-detectable problem: what the symptom is, why it matters for ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity, how to check it yourself and how to fix it — with the plugin and hosting settings involved.
Crawler access
- Critical
Your robots.txt is telling ChatGPT and Perplexity to stay out
If robots.txt disallows GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, AI assistants cannot read your store. The exact rules that fix it.
- Critical
Your firewall answers browsers but rejects AI crawlers
Cloudflare’s AI bot blocking and Bot Fight Mode return 403 to GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot even when robots.txt allows them. Which switches to change.
- Critical
Your robots.txt blocks every crawler
A blanket Disallow: / — usually left over from staging — keeps a WooCommerce store out of Google, Shopping and every AI answer. How to undo it.
AI readability
- Critical
Your product pages have no Product schema
Without Product JSON-LD, ChatGPT and Google cannot verify what you sell, at what price, or whether it is in stock. How to restore valid schema.
- High
Your Product schema has an Offer without a price
A Product Offer without price or priceCurrency cannot appear in Google Shopping or be quoted by AI assistants. Common WooCommerce causes and fixes.
- High
Your Offers do not say whether the product is in stock
AI shopping answers filter on availability. Without schema.org/InStock in your Offer, products quietly drop out of the list. How to add it.
- High
Your products have no GTIN, EAN or MPN
Without GTIN or EAN codes, Merchant Center limits your listings and AI assistants cannot match your product to the same item elsewhere.
- Medium
Your products have no brand
Brand is required for Google merchant listings and used by AI assistants to compare products. How to add brands in WooCommerce and your feed.
Cart, checkout & content
- Critical
Your product data may have stopped reaching Google on 18 August
Google retired the Content API for Shopping on 18 August 2026. Integrations still calling it get HTTP 410 and stop updating — usually with no warning.
- Critical
Your checkout is returning a server error
A WooCommerce checkout returning a critical error or blank page means every purchase fails — often for days. How to diagnose and fix it fast.
- Critical
Checkout says there are no shipping options
When WooCommerce shows "no shipping options available", the order cannot be placed. Zones, plugins and cache causes — and the fix.
- High
Your catalogue has no merchant feed
Google AI Mode, Shopping, Copilot and ChatGPT ground product answers in merchant feeds. Without one, your catalogue is invisible to them.
- High
Your product pages have nothing for AI to answer with
AI assistants answer buyer questions from your page text. One-line supplier descriptions give them nothing to quote. A practical template.
- Medium
Your delivery and returns terms are not where buyers and AI look
Shipping cost, delivery time and returns are what shoppers ask AI most. Buried in a footer, they cost you the recommendation. How to surface them.
- Medium
Your checkout forces customers to register
Requiring an account before purchase is one of the best-measured causes of cart abandonment. One WooCommerce setting fixes it.
Trust & email
- High
Your order confirmations are landing in spam
Missing SPF, DKIM or DMARC sends WooCommerce order confirmations to spam and lets anyone spoof your shop. The DNS records that fix it.
- Medium
Your products carry no rating or review markup
Ratings are among the strongest trust signals AI assistants use when choosing a store. How to collect reviews and output valid rating schema.
- Medium
Your store itself is not identified
Organization schema tells Google and AI assistants who runs the store and where. Without it, answers cannot attribute a recommendation to you.
- Medium
Your WordPress or WooCommerce is out of date
Old WooCommerce releases emit schema current engines reject, lack the GTIN and Brands fields, and are how small stores get compromised.
SEO hygiene
- Critical
Your product pages ask search engines not to index them
A noindex tag on WooCommerce product pages removes every product from Google, Shopping and AI answers. Where it comes from and how to remove it.
- Medium
No XML sitemap found
Without an XML sitemap in robots.txt and Search Console, new and deep product pages take weeks to be discovered. A two-minute fix.
- Medium
Your language versions are not linked with hreflang
A multilingual store without hreflang shows the wrong language to each market and splits its rankings. How to fix it in WPML or Polylang.
- Medium
Your products have no canonical URL
WooCommerce filter and sort URLs create thousands of duplicates. Without canonical tags they split ranking signals. How to set them correctly.
- Low
Your pages have no meta descriptions
Without meta descriptions, Google and AI surfaces scrape random page text for the summary. How to set templates for WooCommerce products.
Speed
- Medium
Your server takes too long to answer
Time to first byte above ~800 ms costs rankings, conversions and crawl coverage. The usual WooCommerce causes, and how to fix each one.
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