How Rank Sniper works.
Scan to monitor.
The Shopify AI-visibility workflow in six moves — scan, detect, prioritize, optimize, verify, monitor. Each stage names who acts, where it happens and its release state. 3 of 6 run today; the rest arrive with the Shopify app.
Six moves.
Who acts at each one.
For Shopify merchants who want AI shopping agents and answer engines to read, quote and act on their catalogue. Each move states what you do and what Rank Sniper does.
- MOV-01Available
Scan
Public site — /free-scanYou: Enter your storefront domain. No install, no account.
Rank Sniper: Identifies itself as RankSniperBot and reads robots.txt first — if it is disallowed, the scan stops. Otherwise it reads /products.json, up to three product pages as raw HTML, /sitemap.xml and /llms.txt. - MOV-02Available
Detect
Public site — your result at /scan/your-domainYou: Read the result. It has its own address, so you can send it to a developer or a client.
Rank Sniper: Scores the catalogue under rubric v1.0 into one composite, re-cuts the same audit into SEO, AEO, GEO and AIO scores, and checks robots.txt against 10 named AI crawlers. - MOV-03Beta
Prioritize
Public result, then HQ Merchant Command by emailed sign-in linkYou: Start with the pillar flagged weakest. Request the full report to see what is failing inside it.
Rank Sniper: Flags the weakest pillar on the public result. The full report lists the failing checks in each pillar, heaviest-weighted first. - MOV-04Planned
Optimize
Shopify app — not yet on the Shopify App StoreYou: Approve changes to native product fields; act on guided steps for what the app cannot reach.
Rank Sniper: Designed to publish structured-data fixes in its own markup layer, draft native-field changes for your approval, and give exact steps for theme, sitemap and llms.txt changes. Nothing is written to any store today. - MOV-05Planned
Verify
Shopify app, confirmed by re-scanYou: Keep the change, or roll it back.
Rank Sniper: Designed to re-fetch what agents actually receive once a fix ships — the raw HTML, and the response to each declared AI user agent — and to keep a versioned prior value for every write. - MOV-06Planned
Monitor
HQ Merchant CommandYou: Act on alerts; open the history when a number moves.
Rank Sniper: Designed to re-scan on a schedule, detect drift when a theme update or another app strips markup, and alert you. Today a re-scan runs only when you ask for one.
Three surfaces.
One record.
The workflow crosses the public site, the Shopify app and HQ Merchant Command. This is the state of every capability on each.
Public site
- Public store scan — composite and four pillar scoresAvailable
- AI-crawler policy read from robots.txtAvailable
- Rank Preview — SEO, AEO, GEO and AIO Preview scores with stated coverageIn development
Shopify app
- Install from the Shopify App StoreIn development
- Connected scan through the Shopify Admin APIPlanned
- Automatic fixes — app-block structured-data markupPlanned
- Automatic fixes — metadata and restructuresPlanned
- Assisted batch rewrites, applied on merchant approvalPlanned
- Post-fix verification — what agents actually receivePlanned
- Versioned rollback on every writePlanned
- Subscriptions billed through ShopifyPlanned
HQ Merchant Command
- Full scan report by emailed sign-in linkBeta
- Support tickets between merchant and Rank Sniper staffAvailable
- HQ Merchant Command on your live store dataIn development
- Recurring re-scans, drift detection and alertsPlanned
- Score and version historyPlanned
SEO → AEO → GEO → AIO.
Always in this order.
From a crawler that indexes a page, to an engine that quotes it, to a model that cites the store, to an agent that acts on the record. Each pillar is scored over what the scan can read for it.
SEO
Whether conventional search engines can crawl, parse, and rank the catalogue.
Product type and tag coverage; title, meta description, canonical and H1 on sampled product pages; sitemap.xml; whether Googlebot or Bingbot is disallowed.
Engage →AEO
Whether the catalogue can be lifted as a direct answer to a shopper's question.
Description depth after stripping HTML; list markup or a number with a unit in the description (a table alone is not recognised); an answer-first opening sentence; question-shaped headings; FAQPage, HowTo or QAPage JSON-LD.
Engage →GEO
Whether generative engines will cite this store when composing a recommendation.
robots.txt policy for named AI crawlers; llms.txt; vendor; numbers with units; named materials and provenance; how recently products were updated.
Engage →AIO
Whether an AI system can correctly parse and act on the record without guessing. Includes transactability as a named sub-score.
Product JSON-LD offers, price with priceCurrency and availability in raw HTML; a SKU on every variant; shipping weight; imagery; real variant options; conflicting prices on one page.
Engage →What it does
not do.
The limits are part of the method. They are stated here so nothing on this page reads as more than it is.
- It writes nothing to your store today. The free scan is read-only, the app that would write is not yet installable, and no merchant’s store has been written to.
- It will not invent a fact. A SKU, a shipping weight, product photography, a brand or a material is something only you hold. When fixes ship, those are asked of you, never guessed — an agent quotes whatever is published.
- It will not change a native field without you. Of the 29 pillar checks, 4 are designed as automatic (structured data in Rank Sniper’s own layer), 20 as assisted (native Shopify fields such as title, description, tags or SKU, written only on your approval) and 5 as guided (theme, sitemap or root-domain changes you make from exact steps).
- It does not query AI engines. It measures what your storefront serves to the crawlers those engines send — structure, completeness and access — not what an engine answers on a given day.
- It does not score backlinks or domain authority. They say nothing about whether an agent can read a product record.
- It does not promise rankings. A score measures what your storefront serves; where an engine places you is that engine’s decision.
Start with move one.
It is free.
The scan and the detection behind it run now. See where your store stands, then read how the platform behind the workflow is built.
