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.
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. Two things are true […]
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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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The feed that puts your products inside ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers needs about eight required fields, not the seventy-plus that validator apps advertise checking. I read the OpenAI and Google feed specs line by line, and the required set is small, shared, and boring: id, title, description, link, image, availability, price, brand. The reason […]
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“How do I get my store recommended by ChatGPT?” is the question I hear most from merchants right now. Search it and you will find a hundred near-identical checklists, and most of them open with the same instruction: drop an agents.md file, or an llms.txt file, at the root of your site and wait to […]
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Today, August 18, 2026, is the day Google turns off the Content API for Shopping. Google’s own release notes put it plainly: “Content API for Shopping will be sunset on August 18, 2026.” There is no grace period and no soft cutoff. If a piece of software on your side still talks to that API, […]
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A written context layer next to the code, and agents that read it before they touch anything: the operating model behind DripSync and Pollen.
Read the note →UCP splits discovery from checkout. Discovery is opening up, checkout is gated, and AP2 handles payments separately. Here's what to do now.
Read the note →Shopify's Agentic Plan solves connection to AI surfaces. It doesn't fix your product data. Here's the line, and what to do about it.
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