Underwing
An elytron is a beetle's armored wing case. The underwing is what unfolds beneath it when it is time to fly. This is that layer of Elytron Labs: notes, analysis, and research on how AI assistants crawl, cite, and recommend online stores.
Since 5 August, every Shopify store on a regular theme has been quietly offering AI agents a set of tools: search your catalog, read your return policy, add to cart, go to checkout. Nothing to install, and no off switch in Shopify’s docs. I loaded five Shopify brands in Chrome on 6 October and called […]
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If you run WooCommerce, nothing puts your products into AI shopping by default the way Shopify now does for its stores. Three doors are open to you today without asking anyone: a Google Merchant Center feed for Google AI Mode and Gemini, a Microsoft Merchant Center feed for Copilot’s organic results, and letting OpenAI’s search […]
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If you sell on Shopify, your products are now offered to four AI assistants by default: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta’s Muse. They do not work the same way. ChatGPT only sends shoppers to your own checkout. The other three can take the whole order inside the assistant, and Shopify […]
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If you run a Shopify store that sells to the US, Canada or Mexico, Meta’s new AI agent, Muse, can now find your products and complete the purchase inside Meta, without the shopper ever reaching your checkout. Shopify switched this on by default for eligible stores. That is good news for conversion, but the checkout […]
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If you sell through Google’s AI shopping surfaces, AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, the field that decides whether Google can find your product for a shopper is your product identifier: the GTIN. It is not a ranking bolt-on you add to climb higher. It is the key Google uses to understand what […]
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If you sell to shoppers in the United States, there is a good chance you can get your products into Perplexity’s shopping answers, and it does not work the way most guides selling “Perplexity optimization” packages tell you. Perplexity does not auction those product cards. Its own help center is blunt: “all product listings are […]
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The advice going around right now is that AI crawlers cannot run JavaScript, so they land on your store, see a blank page, and skip your products. The recommended fix is to server-render everything. Most of that is wrong, and the part that is right has nothing to do with JavaScript. Watch this explainer (3 […]
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If you run a Shopify store that sells to the United States, your products are almost certainly already discoverable in ChatGPT, and you did nothing to make that happen. Shopify’s own Help Center is blunt about it: “You don’t need to do anything for your products to be discovered by ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog.” The […]
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If you have searched for why your store does not show up in ChatGPT, you have almost certainly been told the fix is to edit your robots.txt and let GPTBot crawl your site. I checked that advice against OpenAI’s own documentation, and it is wrong on two separate counts. Allowing GPTBot does not put your […]
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Diagnostic 2 stores checked Schema.org + Google docs verified August 2026 Your AI-Visibility Audit Says Your Price Is Invisible. It Almost Certainly Isn’t. I checked what an audit tool actually searches for versus what a machine actually reads, and found the two are not the same layer of the page. Verdict If an AI-visibility audit […]
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