What is an AI readiness audit?
An AI readiness audit is a check of how well an AI shopping assistant can read and recommend your products. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity to "find me grey suede sneakers under $250," the assistant doesn't browse your store the way a person does. It works from the details it can read on your product page, as data, and decides in seconds whether your product is a match it can trust.
If those details are thin, mislabeled, or buried in a paragraph, the assistant skips your product and recommends someone else's. The audit tells you, product by product, whether AI can actually use what's on your page.
What does the audit check?
Five things, in the order an agent works through them. Each one is a layer in your score.
| Layer | The question an agent is answering |
|---|---|
| Getting in | Am I allowed to fetch this page, and does it answer? |
| Reading the page | Is the product in the page that arrives, before anything runs? |
| Knowing the product | Do I know what this is well enough to compare it? |
| Trusting the store | Would I put my name behind recommending this seller? |
| Completing the sale | Can I actually buy it? |
Reading the page carries the most weight, because four of the five engines we score against never run JavaScript. A product that appears only after the page loads is a product most agents never see.
Your score is out of the points that applied to your page. Checks we could not run, and checks that do not apply to your kind of product, leave the total instead of counting against you, and the report says which points were set aside and why. The full weighting, every cap, and how we calibrated the scale are on the methodology page.
Where do the numbers come from?
Every point traces back to a checkable property of your real page, and each finding quotes what we found so you can go and look. We don't compare you to a made-up industry average and we don't project a score we can't back up.
Your position against other stores comes from a real distribution: 235 product pages across 116 stores on Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and BigCommerce, scanned on July 25, 2026, and kept so any ranking claim can be checked by hand.
What did we find across 235 product pages?
The median page scored 66 out of 100, which sounds healthy until you look at what the score is made of. Ninety-two percent of stores have no return policy an agent can read as data. Ninety-four percent have no readable shipping terms. Ninety-eight percent have no live connection an agent could query for the catalog. For 110 of the 235 pages, an agent has none of those three things, so it can't complete a purchase at all.
| What an agent looks for | Stores where it is readable, of 235 |
|---|---|
| Price and currency | 171 (73%) |
| What kind of product this is | 144 (61%) |
| Ratings and reviews | 55 (23%) |
| A full product code, barcode included | 33 (14%) |
| A return policy | 14 (6%) |
| Shipping terms | 7 (3%) |
| A live line to the catalog | 0 |
Nineteen of those 235 pages carry an instruction telling search engines to leave them out. These are live products in real stores, it is almost never deliberate, and it takes a minute to fix once you know. The full write-up is in the study.
How is this different from tools that only monitor AI visibility?
Most AI visibility tools tell you where you stand. They track whether your brand shows up in AI answers and how often. That's useful, but it stops at the scoreboard. When you find out you're not showing up, you still don't know why, or what to change.
The Acom audit reads the page, finds the specific reasons an agent would skip your product, and tells you what to fix first.
| Monitoring-only tools | Acom audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Tracks whether you appear in AI answers | Yes | No, it measures page readiness instead |
| Scores how ready your page is for AI | No | Yes, out of 100 |
| Tells you the specific reasons why | No | Yes, layer by layer |
| Shows the evidence behind each finding | No | Yes, quoted from your page |
| Points to the exact fix | No | Yes, per finding |
| Setup required | Account, tracking setup | None, paste one link |
| Cost to start | Usually paid | Free |
How long does it take and what do I need?
About a minute, and all you need is one product link. Paste the URL of a product you care about, ideally a best seller. We fetch the page the way an agent does, without running JavaScript, because that is what four of the five engines see. We check your policy pages and catalog endpoints, then score what we found.
Then we email a 6-digit code to confirm it's you, and your full report opens. You don't create an account, connect your store, or enter a card. You can audit another product right after.
Which store platforms does it work with?
Any of them. The audit reads your live product page as it exists on the web, so the platform underneath doesn't matter. Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Squarespace, or a fully custom store all get the same read.
This matters because a well-built page on one platform can beat a thin page on another. The audit judges your product page, not the platform it runs on.
What happens after I see my score?
You get a plain-English list of what's holding the product back, grouped by the five layers, with the evidence and the specific fix for each finding. You can take that list and fix the page yourself. Nothing about the report is locked to Acom.
If you'd rather not do it by hand across every product, that's what Acom is for. A free trial connects your store and applies the fixes across your catalog: correcting mismatches, publishing the shipping, returns and product details agents need to read, and serving a clean version an agent can work from. You approve the changes before anything goes live.