How AI tools read a website
Most tools open the page in a headless browser, take screenshots, and read the text, headings, buttons, colours and structured data. Store platforms are read through their own product feeds where they have them. A language model then turns all of it into a summary. Each check below makes one of those steps more reliable.
1. Let the page load for a machine
Bot protection that serves a challenge page hides the whole site. One large store answered our reader with a 403; another served a "Hang tight" waiting screen, which a careless tool would have described as the brand. If you want AI tools to describe you, let well-behaved crawlers through, and check what your site returns to a headless browser.
For answer engines, robots.txt decides who may read you. OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Bingbot are the crawlers that decide whether you can be cited in those engines' answers. Blocking a training crawler such as GPTBot does not take you out of AI search; blocking a search crawler does.
2. Expose your catalogue
Store platforms already publish a clean product feed. Shopify serves /products.json, and each product at /products/<handle>.json; WooCommerce has its Store API. If your platform has neither, add Product structured data (JSON-LD) to every product page, with the name, description, image, price and currency.
Shopify's feed lists the newest products first, so the products your homepage leads with can be missing from it. Link your featured products from the homepage with their real product addresses, so a reader can fetch them directly.
3. Put a currency on every price
Shopify's products.json has prices but no currency, so tools look for it on the page or guess. Write the currency next to the price, and set priceCurrency in your structured data.
If your store changes prices by the visitor's country, a tool sees the price for its own server's location: one WooCommerce store answered our server in Pakistani rupees. Structured data with the currency makes that visible instead of silently wrong.
4. Make your brand colour findable
Tools pick a brand colour from what is painted on the page and from the theme-color meta tag. On a dark site, theme-color is usually the background, so the brand comes out near-black: one software company's indigo lost to its #08090A background that way. Use your brand colour where it is plainly visible, on buttons, links and the logo.
5. Make your logo obvious
Put the logo in the header as an image or an inline SVG, with "logo" in its file name, class or alt text, and link it to your homepage. Readers score the candidates, and on one store the first picture in the header was a search icon. Add the logo to your Organization structured data as well.
6. Paint something on the first screen
A hero that fades in after a delay leaves the first screenshot empty: one site's first screen came back as a flat dark frame. Render your headline and main picture in the first paint. It helps your Largest Contentful Paint score too.
7. Say what kind of product you are
Software is one product. Unless the site says so, a reader may list its feature sections as separate products for sale. Use SoftwareApplication structured data for an app or a SaaS, and Product for physical goods.
8. Keep words in text, not in pictures
Claims, product names, prices and offers set inside images are read poorly or not at all. Put them in HTML text, even where an image repeats them. Text is also what answer engines quote.
9. Have a website, not only a social profile
Instagram, Facebook and TikTok show a logged-out reader a login wall, so tools fall back to web search, and web search mixes up businesses with the same name. Looking up one cake shop's Instagram, a search placed it in three different cities on three runs. A website with your name, your city and your products settles it.
10. Use the same name and links everywhere
Link your social profiles from your site, list them as sameAs in your Organization structured data, and use the same name, logo and description on each. That is how engines decide that all of them are one business.
11. Make your app icon carry your colour
On an app store listing, most of the colour on the page is the store's own: Google Play's green install button won the first test of our reader. The app icon is the one part of the listing that is yours, so its colour is what a careful reader trusts. Keep it in your brand colour.
12. Check what a machine sees
Open your site with JavaScript turned off and read what is left. Fetch your homepage with curl and look for your product names in it. Then paste your address into a tool that reads sites, Hyzgen's brand kit included, and compare its summary with what you would say yourself.