Most store owners have no idea whether ChatGPT can even see their business. This is the 10-minute check I run first on every store, including my mom's. No tools to buy. You need your website, an AI chat window, and a browser tab.
Open ChatGPT and Perplexity. Ask five questions a real customer would ask, in plain words: your product category plus your town, a how-to question you know the answer to, and "what should I look for when buying" your main product. Watch for two things: does your business ever get named, and whose pages do the answers cite? Those cited pages are your real competition in AI search, and they are rarely who you think.
Type yourdomain.com/robots.txt into a browser. Look for lines that say "Disallow" under user agents named GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, or Google-Extended. Blocking these bots means AI engines cannot read your site at all, and some platforms and plugins block them by default as a privacy stance. That stance is a choice, but for a small business trying to get found, it is usually the wrong default nobody told you about.
Run your best-selling product's page through Google's Rich Results Test (search the phrase, it's a free Google tool). It shows whether your structured data, the machine-readable description of your product, price, and stock, actually parses. On Shopify, your theme generates this automatically, but themes get it wrong more often than you'd think. Errors here mean engines are guessing at your catalog.
Open your About page or a product page and read only the headings and first sentences. Could a stranger answer "what is this business, what does it sell, and where" from that skim? That skim is roughly what an AI extracts. If the answer lives in an image, a logo, or your head, the machine does not have it. My mom's shop had 990 product images with no alt text; the machine was blind to a third of the store.
Never named, but competitors are cited: you have a visibility gap and real upside; start with the entity and passage work in the plain-English GEO guide for small business owners. Blocked crawlers: unblock them this week; it is the highest-leverage five-minute fix in this whole field. Schema errors: fixable in a weekend, and on Shopify usually a theme setting or an app away. Everything passing: you are ahead of most of your market, and the next fight is earning citations with content worth pulling.
This check is becoming one of the channel's first videos, run live on a real store: subscribe at youtube.com/@itsryanlenk to catch it. The receipts from running the full method on my mom's shop, 80 AI citations in 30 days on $0 in ads, are in the full case study article.