What your agent endpoint serves

This is the only check here that reads what an AI agent actually receives rather than what your pages contain. We ask your store for its catalogue the way a shopping agent would, and report what came back.

What we did

Your store answers an agent-commerce endpoint at /api/ucp/mcp, speaking the Universal Commerce Protocol. You did not switch it on and it is not in your admin. We called it, asked for products matching one of your own product titles, and read the fields it returned. You can do the same in one command — we show you how.

Most of what comes back is Shopify’s doing and is already correct: the title, the description, the canonical URL, the price as an integer with a currency, the variants, the images. There is nothing to fix there and we will not invent something.

The field that is yours

Product category. In your Shopify admin, on the product, the Category field — it maps to Shopify’s standard product taxonomy and it travels to the agent as a category identifier. A product with none arrives at an agent uncategorised.

What that costs you is worth being exact about, because the obvious answer turns out to be wrong. The protocol has a category filter — filters.categories is in the published schema, so an agent is plainly meant to be able to narrow a search to a category. On 30 August 2026 we tried it on four live stores, sending the taxonomy identifier, the bare identifier, the category name and the full breadcrumb. On three of them the filter changed nothing at all: a category that does not exist returned the same ten products as no filter. On the fourth, every value we sent returned zero products, including the exact category its own products carried. Whatever that filter is doing today, it is not narrowing a search to your category, and we are not going to tell you a blank one gets you excluded from a set. The readings are here.

What it does cost you is smaller and real. The category is the only field in the whole response that says what the product is in a form a machine can act on without interpreting prose. Your title and description are sentences; an agent deciding whether your item answers the question in front of it has to read them and infer. The category is the one line it does not have to guess at, and on a fifth of products it is blank.

It is set per product, it takes seconds, and Shopify will suggest the category from the product title if you let it. If you have hundreds of products, the bulk editor takes the column.

SKUs, which we report and do not mark you down for

If a store returns no SKU on any variant we say so, because an agent reconciling an order it placed last month, or matching your item against a price comparison, uses it. But plenty of stores have no business having SKUs — one-off vintage stock, made-to-order work, a single-product store — and penalising those would be scoring a store down for its business model. So it is a note, not a finding.

What this check is not

It is not a measure of whether AI can find your store. The endpoint answers an agent that already knows your domain and is asking you directly — the buying path, which Shopify has covered.

Getting named in an assistant’s answer is a different problem that runs through your pages rather than this endpoint, and it is decided by what your product pages state literally and by what other people have written about you. Two paths. This check measures one of them and says which.

If this check is missing from your report, it means we could not get a clean reading — a rate limit, a timeout, or a query of ours that matched nothing in your catalogue. That is our problem rather than yours, and we would rather show nothing than a guess.

Checking your own store

The scan below reads your storefront the way a crawler does and reports this check along with the rest. It is free and needs no account.

Free, no signup. Takes about ten seconds.

The other checks

Install Shelfglance on my store

Installs on any Shopify store. The free plan needs no card, and the dashboard runs on sample data if you would rather look first. Shopify will note that the app has not been reviewed yet: the App Store listing is still in review, and that governs who can find Shelfglance, not who can install it.