llms.txt on Shopify

Almost every guide to this file is describing a different file. On Shopify you have not got a curated list of your best pages, you have got a protocol document Shopify wrote, and it is doing more than the version you were about to hand-write ever would.

Across 2,954 Shopify storefronts we have scanned, 4% fall short on llms.txt.

Go and look at yours

Open yourstore.com/llms.txt right now. Unless something is badly wrong you will get a document that begins # Agent Instructions — Your Store. You did not write it, you were not asked, and it is served on every Shopify storefront we have checked, including stores that fail every other check we run.

This matters because the widely-copied advice — create a page with the handle llms-txt, list your shipping policy and your best collections — produces a worse file at a worse URL than the one you already have. If you follow it you will end up maintaining a duplicate at /pages/llms-txt that nothing reads, while the real one carries on doing its job.

What is actually in it

Not a content map. An operating manual for software that wants to buy something from you. Yours will contain, in this order:

A recommendation to install the Shop skill. Shopify points buy-for-me agents at https://shop.app/SKILL.md, which gives them cross-store catalogue search and checkout through Shop Pay without the agent ever touching a card number.
Your commerce endpoints. Discovery at /.well-known/ucp and a live MCP endpoint at /api/ucp/mcp, speaking the Universal Commerce Protocol.
The purchase flow, spelled out — search the catalogue, create a cart, create a checkout, set shipping, complete. Complete requires the buyer’s approval at the moment of payment, which the document states as a rule rather than a suggestion.
Read-only routes for agents that are not buying, including /products/{handle}.json.

So the file is real, it is specific, and it is aimed at a reader that definitely exists. That is a considerable change from the situation this page used to describe, and it happened without merchants being told.

Then what is this check worth

Less than the others, and we would rather say so than pad a report. Nearly every store passes it, because Shopify ships the file, so a pass tells you that you are on Shopify and little else. We keep it because a failure is informative: a store that does not serve one has usually had its storefront intercepted — a password page, a bot filter, a proxy in front of the domain — and that is worth knowing, though what it is really telling you is something about reachability rather than about this file.

If you want the check that changes what an assistant can say about you, it is your product structured data, and that page is careful about what it does and does not buy you.

If you want to add your own content anyway

You cannot edit the generated file, and Shopify has no route for arbitrary files at the domain root. The options are the same as they ever were and none of them is compelling:

Create a page with the handle llms-txt and a plain-text template. It lives at /pages/llms-txt, which is not the path anything looks at.
If your domain is already proxied through Cloudflare or similar, you can serve your own /llms.txt there — but you would be replacing a working agent-commerce manual with a list of links, which is a downgrade.

The honest recommendation is to leave it alone. The one thing worth doing is reading yours once, so that you know what your store is telling agents, because it is telling them a lot.

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.