Platform guide
Shopify and AI Bots: Check and Edit Your robots.txt
Shopify creates your robots.txt for you, and a store owner changes it by adding a robots.txt.liquid template to the theme. Open yourstore.com/robots.txt first to see whether any AI bot is blocked. If nothing blocks them, you may not need to edit anything at all.
What Shopify's Default robots.txt Does
Shopify generates a robots.txt for every store. Its default rules mainly keep crawlers out of non-content paths such as the cart, checkout and account pages. Third-party guides report that the default file does not name AI search bots, but you should read your own file rather than trust a guide.
In 2025 Shopify added a comment to the default file saying that scraping bots and automated buying agents are not allowed to complete purchases without a human check. A Shopify engineer quoted by Modern Retail said the change added no new bot rules and only points developers to Shopify's Checkout Kit. Some blog posts describe that comment as a block on AI crawlers. It is a note for developers, not a rule that stops a search bot reading your product pages.
How to Check Your Store
Check your store in two steps: read the robots.txt it serves, then test what each AI bot actually receives. The first shows the rules and the second shows the real response.
Read your robots.txt
Open yourstore.com/robots.txt. Look for User-agent lines naming GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, followed by Disallow: /. If a line like that exists, someone added it or an app did.
Test as each bot
Run the free GeoLint audit on a product or collection page. It requests the page as each AI search bot and shows the status code, so you can see a firewall or app block that robots.txt does not show.
How to Edit robots.txt on Shopify
To edit robots.txt on Shopify, create a template named robots.txt.liquid in your theme's Templates folder. According to Shopify's developer documentation, this template replaces the file Shopify generates, so keep a copy of the current output and compare before you publish.
- In the theme code editor, open the Templates folder and add a new file named robots.txt.liquid.
- Use the Liquid objects Shopify provides, such as robots.default_groups, so the default rules are kept. Shopify advises against pasting plain text, because the rendered output may differ from the default.
- Add custom rules outside the default loop, for example a User-agent group for a bot you want to allow or block.
- Save, then open /robots.txt again and compare it with the copy you kept.
Edit a copy of your theme first if you can. A mistake in this template changes what every crawler sees, search engines included. Shopify's documentation also covers rules for stores using Markets, so read it before adding host-specific rules.
Which AI Bots to Allow on a Store
Most stores that want to be found in AI answers allow the search and user-fetch bots, and treat training bots as a separate choice. Keep cart, checkout and account paths blocked either way.
Search bots such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot build the indexes AI answers draw on. User bots such as ChatGPT-User open a page when a person asks. Training bots such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot collect content for models, and blocking them is a policy choice. The GPTBot guide and the robots.txt guide explain each bot and give copy-ready rules.
Remember that robots.txt is only half of access. A store behind Cloudflare or a security app can still block a bot, which is covered in Cloudflare blocking AI bots.
Shopify and AI Bots: Common Questions
Does Shopify block ChatGPT?
Third-party guides report that the default Shopify robots.txt does not name AI search bots, and a Shopify engineer said its 2025 note about automated buying agents added no new rules. Your own file may differ if an app or a theme edit changed it, so open your robots.txt and test the page.
Do I need robots.txt.liquid to be visible in AI search?
Not if nothing blocks the bots. You only need the template to remove a rule that blocks a bot you want, or to add rules for a bot you want to restrict.
Can I block AI training but stay visible in AI answers?
Often yes, because the bots have separate user agents. Allow search and user bots and disallow the training bots in robots.txt. Check each company's current documentation, since purposes and names change.
Why does GeoLint show a block when my robots.txt allows the bot?
Something outside robots.txt is refusing the request, such as a CDN or firewall rule, a security app or a rate limit. The audit reports the status code the bot actually received.
Check your own website for free
GeoLint asks each AI search bot for your page, loads it with and without JavaScript and shows what is blocking you. It is free, needs no signup and takes about 20 seconds.