Merchant help center

OtoRank is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for your Shopify store — it makes your products discoverable and recommendable by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, the same way an SEO app optimizes you for Google.

• Scores every product for AI discoverability and flags exactly what to fix
• Generates AI-optimized descriptions, FAQs, buyer guides, comparisons, and use cases
• Publishes an llms.txt file — a structured index AI agents read to understand your catalogue
• Tracks AI crawler visits and AI-referred traffic and revenue

The one-time setup wizard has three steps:

• Activate the app embed in your theme, so your store can serve /llms.txt on your own domain
• Confirm your store identity (brand mission, support email, primary market, shipping regions) — pre-filled with suggestions pulled from your Shopify data
• Generate your first AI discovery files — this takes about 30 seconds

If you close the wizard partway through, it resumes from where you left off next time you open the app.

When you first install OtoRank, it imports your full product catalogue before it can calculate AEO scores. Large catalogues take longer. The Overview page shows live progress and moves you into the setup wizard automatically once syncing finishes.

OtoRank only runs embedded inside your Shopify admin, where it can securely identify your store. Open it from your Shopify admin's Apps list rather than a bookmarked or shared link.

Every product gets a 0–100 AEO score built from five pillars: content quality (description depth and structure), trust signals (reviews, policies), crawlability (images, variants, tags), catalogue completeness (vendor, product type, collections), and AI traffic (how often AI crawlers actually visit).

Products scoring below 70 are marked "Needs work" or "Critical" and show exactly which flags are costing points — click a flag badge to see why it matters.

Each flag is a specific, fixable gap in a product's AI-readiness:

• Missing description / Description too short — no description, or too little detail for an AI agent to work with
• No FAQs — no structured Q&A content published for the product
• No images / Only one image — a second image earns extra points
• No tags / No vendor / No product type — missing catalogue metadata AI agents use to categorise products
• Low AEO score — the product's overall score is below the healthy threshold
• No reviews / Reviews below 4.5★ — review volume and rating feed into trust signals

Hover or tap a flag badge on the Products page for the exact explanation of that flag.

Open a product from the Products page and choose which content to generate: Product Description, FAQs, Buyer Guide, Comparison, or Use Cases. Each generation uses AI credits and produces a draft that lands in your Review Queue rather than publishing immediately.

From the Products list you can also select multiple products and use "Generate All" to queue content across your whole catalogue at once — OtoRank only targets the specific content types each product is actually missing.

Every piece of AI-generated content lands in the Review Queue as a draft first — nothing publishes to your storefront automatically. From there you can:

• Approve a single draft, approve several selected drafts, or approve everything at once
• Reject a draft you don't want to use
• Switch between an individual (flat, newest-first) view and a grouped-by-product view

Approved drafts publish in the background, so a large batch keeps processing even if you navigate away. A draft that fails to publish reappears in the queue with an error message instead of disappearing silently.

The Products page supports searching by name, sorting by AEO score (highest or lowest first), and filtering by score range, specific flags, vendor, product type, tags, or products missing from a collection. Your filters are remembered per browser tab, so refreshing the page doesn't reset your view.

llms.txt is an emerging standard AI assistants check to understand a website — similar to how sitemap.xml works for search engines. OtoRank builds two files for your store:

• llms.txt — the entry point: store identity, catalogue overview, policies, shipping info, and agent guidelines
• llms-full.txt — the complete catalogue: full descriptions, FAQs, variants, pricing, and availability for every product

These are what let ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and similar tools understand and recommend your products.

AI crawlers check yourstore.com/llms.txt first — that's the canonical location the standard expects. OtoRank installs a small template in your theme so Shopify serves the file directly from your domain; the OtoRank-hosted copy still works as a fallback. This installs automatically the next time your files regenerate.

Files regenerate automatically when a product changes, AI content is published, policies sync, or you update AI Settings. You can also click "Regenerate files" on the AI Files page for a manual rebuild — it takes about 30 seconds and there's a 60-second cooldown between manual regenerations.

Automatic regeneration from product changes has a daily cap; once you hit it, automatic regeneration pauses until midnight, but manual regeneration keeps working.

AI Settings controls exactly what AI agents know about your store, grouped into Store Identity, Support Contact, Shipping Information, and Agent Guidance. Every field here feeds directly into llms.txt, and the "Profile completeness" bar shows how many of the fields available on your plan are filled in.

Fields showing placeholder text as a suggestion are pre-filled from your existing Shopify data — accept the suggestion with one click or type your own value.

Some AI Settings fields are only available on paid plans. A locked field shows which plan unlocks it, with a direct link to Billing & Credits to upgrade.

Yes. Saving triggers a background rebuild of llms.txt and llms-full.txt that usually finishes in 10–30 seconds. If you open the file immediately you may briefly see the previous version — wait a moment and refresh.

Published shipping, refund, and privacy policies are read into llms.txt so AI agents can answer customer questions about them directly — and they count toward your trust-signal points. Shipping and refund policies carry the most weight; a few others are optional and don't affect scoring but are still included when published.

Click "Add policy" next to the missing item — it opens the right page in your Shopify admin's legal settings. After publishing it there, come back and click "Refresh from Shopify" to pull it in and update your score immediately (it also syncs automatically during regular content syncs).

Analytics tracks your average AEO score over time, which AI bots have crawled your store (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and others) and how often, plus which llms.txt file they hit.

OtoRank uses a store pixel to detect sessions arriving from known AI-assistant referrers, then matches them to sessions, orders, and revenue by source, with a trend chart over time. This feature requires a paid plan.

• Free — see which products are invisible to AI, AEO scores, and gap analysis (no content generation)
• Growth — AI content generation with 250 credits/month, auto-updating llms.txt, and the AI crawler dashboard
• Pro — 750 credits/month, priority processing, bulk "Generate All", and AI-referred traffic & revenue analytics
• Enterprise — 2,000 credits/month, bulk generation across your entire catalogue, and dedicated onboarding

1 AI credit = one AI-generated content piece: a full product description, a set of FAQs, a buyer guide, a comparison, or a use-cases section. You have two credit pools:

• Subscription credits — included with your plan, renew every billing cycle, and expire at the end of each cycle
• Pack credits — bought separately, never expire, and roll over with no limit

When you generate content, subscription credits are used first; pack credits cover the rest.

Yes — credit packs (250 or 750 credits) are available as a one-time purchase from the Billing & Credits page regardless of your plan, and those credits never expire.

You've used up both your subscription and pack credit balances. Either wait for your subscription credits to renew next cycle, or buy a credit pack to continue generating content immediately.