# Checks on robots.txt, schema and theme that decide whether AI can read your store.

Beyond single products, Sphen.ai checks your storefront as a whole: robots.txt and AI crawlers, noindex and snippet directives, Organization and WebSite schema, headings, navigation and trust elements. Each finding comes with guidance for your theme.

Canonical: https://sphen.ai/features/ai-trust-audit/

## What does the AI Trust audit check?

The AI Trust audit checks your Shopify storefront as a whole. It fetches robots.txt, llms.txt, the homepage and a product page and looks for blocked AI crawlers, missing sitemap references, noindex and snippet directives, canonical mismatches, missing Organization, WebSite and review schema, heading structure, navigation links and product page trust elements. Each finding becomes a review-only recommendation with guidance.

## What do you see in the app?

- **One card in Recommendations**: Store-level findings are grouped under AI Trust audit: N recommendations for your theme & policies. A banner explains that these actions are review-only: use the guidance to update your theme, policy pages, schema or app configuration, then rerun the audit.
- **What is checked**: Make robots.txt reachable, Allow AI crawlers, Reference sitemap in robots.txt, Make storefront crawlable, Remove storefront noindex, Remove snippet blockers, Fix homepage canonical, Add WebSite search schema, Add Organization schema, Improve external trust signal, Add review schema, Make content visible without JavaScript, Fix homepage heading structure, Point navigation to category pages, Add categories to navigation and Add product page trust elements.
- **Evidence per finding**: Each recommendation shows the signal, the current value where there is one — for example the list of blocked bots or the navigation links pointing at search results — the threshold, and a concrete recommendation for the theme.

## The problem

A perfect product page does not help if the storefront blocks the reader.

- **Crawlers locked out**: One Disallow line for GPTBot, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot and no AI assistant reads your catalog, however good the copy.
- **Missing store-level schema**: Without Organization and WebSite schema, engines have no stable identity for your brand and no search action to follow.
- **Theme signals nobody audits**: Noindex leftovers, two H1s, navigation that links to search results: small theme decisions that quietly cost visibility.

## How it works

1. **The storefront is fetched**: Sphen.ai reads your robots.txt, llms.txt, homepage and a product page the way a crawler does, and records what it finds.
2. **Findings become recommendations**: Each gap appears in Recommendations under AI Trust audit, with the signal, the current value, the threshold and the fix.
3. **You change the theme, the audit verifies**: AI Trust actions are review-only. You update theme, policy pages or schema, rerun the audit, and the finding closes when the signal is verified.

## You stay in control

- AI Trust actions never write to your theme or your policy pages.
- Every finding names the signal, the current value and the threshold it was checked against.
- Findings stay open until the next audit verifies the change.

## Questions

### Which AI crawlers does the audit look for?

Allow AI crawlers checks whether GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot are allowed in your robots.txt. Blocked bots are listed as the current value, so you know exactly which rule to change.

### Does Sphen.ai change my theme?

No. AI Trust actions are review-only. Sphen.ai describes what to change in your theme, navigation, policy pages or schema; you make the change and the next audit verifies it. For structured data, the Sphen.ai Structured Data app embed can supply Organization, WebSite and Product schema once you activate it in the theme editor.

### Why is my storefront marked as not crawlable?

Make storefront crawlable fires when the homepage does not return a normal HTML page to a crawler — typically a password page, bot protection or a redirect loop. Until that is fixed, the other checks cannot run.

### What are product page trust elements?

Add product page trust elements checks one product page for Product schema, customer reviews, related products and a size or usage guide, and lists which of them are missing.

### When does a finding close?

When the next audit verifies the signal. AI Trust actions stay open until then and are never bulk-applied.