Ask ChatGPT or Claude for "a waterproof hiking watch with a barometer under 200" and you don't get ten blue links. You get a shortlist, with reasons. For a growing slice of shoppers, that shortlist is the storefront. They never reach a category page. Which raises an uncomfortable question for anyone running a catalog: when an assistant builds that list, is your store on it?
On Shopify, answering that is increasingly the platform's job. Shopify now ships an Agentic Storefronts page in the admin that feeds your catalog into AI channels like ChatGPT and Copilot, then reports which queries you surface for. You can argue about how well it works, but it's native: a toggle. On Magento there is no toggle. If you want a Magento store to be legible to an AI assistant, that's on you to build.
I spent the last few months building exactly that: a module that exposes a Magento catalog to AI crawlers and assistants. The work sorts cleanly into four layers. None of them are exotic. Most stores are missing all four.
Layer 1: Let the crawlers in, deliberately
AI assistants are fed two ways: live retrieval at question time, and index crawls ahead of time. Both arrive as bots with their own user agents: GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, and a growing list.
