How Do I Know if LLMs Can Access My Ecommerce Website?

If you want to rank on Google, your site needs to be indexable.

If you want AI models to mention or reference your site, they first need to be able to access it.

In this article, we’ll break down how LLMs interact with websites and how you can check whether they can reach yours. By the end, you’ll know what to look out for and how to make sure your content isn’t invisible to AI—so every optimization you make actually counts.

What Is LLM Crawlability?

LLM crawlability refers to how easily AI language models can access and process the content on your website. Just like traditional search engine crawlers, LLMs need to be able to "read" your web pages to include them in their knowledge base.

There are three main aspects of LLM crawlability:

1. Technical Access: Whether LLMs can physically reach your content through their web crawlers. This involves proper server configurations and robots.txt settings.
2. Content Readability: How well your content is structured and formatted for machine processing. Clean HTML, proper headings, and clear text hierarchy make it easier for LLMs to understand your content.
3. Data Freshness: How current and accessible your content is in AI training datasets. Most LLMs are trained on snapshots of the internet from specific time periods.

When your site has good LLM crawlability, it means AI models can:

• Access your pages without technical barriers
• Understand your content's context and meaning
• Reference your information accurately when responding to queries
• Include your site in their training data for future updates

Poor LLM crawlability, on the other hand, can make your site invisible to AI systems, potentially limiting your content's reach and influence in an increasingly AI-driven digital landscape.

How do LLMs Interact with Websites?

Large language models don’t all pull content from the web the same way. Instead, they rely on a few main “routes” to get information:

• Direct crawlers: Some LLMs have their own bots (like GPTBot or CCBot) that scan websites directly, similar to how Googlebot works.
• Third-party datasets: Many models use large-scale crawls like Common Crawl, or tap into search engine indexes (e.g., Bing).
• Licensed content: Some companies pay for rights to use data from publishers, research databases, or other providers.
• Live lookups: Certain AI tools (like Perplexity or ChatGPT with browsing) can fetch current web content when you ask them a question.

For ecommerce brands, this means your site might show up in AI responses in different ways: through an LLM’s own crawler, through Bing or Google’s index, or only when a user prompt triggers a live lookup. Making your site accessible to these routes increases your chances of being referenced by AI tools.

How Do I Know if LLMs Can Access My Website?

A common way people test this is by simply typing their brand name into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another AI search tool to see if their website comes up. It’s a quick gut check, and if your site is mentioned, it’s a good sign that the model has some way of accessing your content.

But that’s only part of the picture. AI tools don’t always cite their sources, and each one pulls information differently. Perplexity, for instance, may surface your site through Bing’s index, while GPTBot may or may not have crawled your site directly. Just because your brand shows up in one AI doesn’t guarantee visibility across all of them.

For a more reliable check, here are a few steps you can take:

Check your robots.txt file

• Type yourdomain.com/robots.txt into your browser.
• Look for entries like User-agent: GPTBot or User-agent: CCBot.
• If you see Disallow: /, that means those crawlers are blocked. If you don’t see them listed, they’re allowed by default.

Run a live crawler test

• Use a tool like GPTBot Checker or AI-specific SEO checkers.
• Enter your website URL. The tool will tell you whether common AI crawlers can access your site.

Check if AI bots have visited your site

• If you have access to your server access logs, search for user-agent names like “GPTBot”, “CCBot”, or "PerplexityBot" in your traffic records.
• Seeing them there means your site has already been crawled.

Search AI tools with specific prompts

• Instead of just typing your brand, ask something like “What does [brand] sell?” or “Show me products from [brand].”
• If the AI points to your site or pulls details directly from it, that’s a strong sign it can access your content.

Keep in mind that even if your site is open to these crawlers, it doesn’t guarantee your content will appear in AI answers. Opening the door just makes it possible for them to see you, and that’s the first step to being referenced.

How to Improve LLM Crawlability: Top Optimizations

Once you’ve confirmed that AI crawlers can reach your site, the next step is to make your content easy for them to understand and process.

Many of the practices here will look familiar if you’re a seasoned SEO specialist. And it's exactly that—the same optimizations that help Google index your site also make it easier for LLMs to crawl and interpret.

Structure Your Content Clearly

Use proper heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3): Each page should have a single H1, typically the product or category name. Use H2s to mark major sections like “Features” or “Specifications,” and H3s for supporting details under those sections. If you're unsure, try adding an extension like the HeadingsMap to check your headers.

Break content into logical sections: Separate product details, reviews, shipping info, and FAQs, with clear headers. This can help AI systems interpret each section without confusion.

Maintain clean, semantic HTML: Ensure key details like price, size, and availability are written as text on the page, not hidden in images or loaded only through JavaScript. This way, crawlers can reliably read and interpret the information.

Provide Rich Context

Write comprehensive product descriptions: Go beyond just color and size. Instead of saying “blue sofa,” describe the material, dimensions, style, and use cases. For example, “a modern blue velvet sofa with wooden legs, 3-seater, 210cm wide, designed for small living rooms.” The more context you include, the easier it is for crawlers (and customers) to understand your product.

Include metadata and schema markup: Use structured data like Product schema to specify attributes such as price, brand, availability, and ratings. Structured markup makes your product details unambiguous and easier for systems to interpret consistently.

Use descriptive alt text for images: Avoid generic labels like “image123.jpg.” Instead, write alt text that clearly describes the product, such as “women’s red midi dress with floral print.” This improves accessibility and gives crawlers additional signals about what’s on the page.

Create detailed category and collection pages: Don’t just show a grid of products. Add a short description of the category, highlight key features, or provide buying tips. This extra context turns a simple product list into a resource page that explains how your catalog fits together.

Optimize Technical Elements

Ensure fast page load times: Slow websites frustrate both shoppers and crawlers. Compress images, remove unused scripts, and use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to spot bottlenecks. Faster sites are more likely to be crawled thoroughly.

Implement XML sitemaps: Most ecommerce platforms (like Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento) automatically generate a sitemap for you. Your job is to confirm it exists (usually at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) and submit it once through Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. Check periodically to make sure your key product and category pages are included.

Use canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content: Ecommerce sites often generate multiple URLs for the same product (for example, with tracking parameters or variant selectors). Canonical tags point crawlers to the primary version of the page, preventing dilution of your product content across duplicates.

Keep your robots.txt file updated and properly configured: Make sure you’re not accidentally blocking important sections of your site, like product or category pages. Update the file whenever you launch new sections or subdomains so crawlers always have the right instructions.

Conclusion

LLM crawlability may sound like a new challenge, but in reality, it builds on the same foundations ecommerce teams already know from SEO. If your site is accessible, structured clearly, and filled with rich, useful content, you’re not just making it easier for Google to index — you’re also opening the door for AI models to understand and reference your brand.

The key takeaway: you can’t control exactly how or when LLMs use your content, but you can control whether your site is ready for them. Clear product information, clean technical setup, and structured data give you the best chance of being surfaced in AI-driven answers and tools.

Think of it this way: every optimization you make for crawlability today pays off twice, once in search and once in AI discovery. Not a bad return on effort.

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