133 of 10,099 Shopify stores block an AI crawler. Six block the one ChatGPT shops with.

Merchants are told two opposite things about AI crawlers: block them, because they take your content and give nothing back; and admit them, because that is how a store gets into an AI shopping answer. Both assume a decision is being made. We wanted to know how many stores have made one, and which way. Method Every store in a corpus of 10,099 known Shopify storefronts has its /robots.txt read as part of a scan. The file is parsed the way the major crawlers document parsing it: most specific User-agent group wins, * is the fallback, longest matching path rule wins, Allow beats Disallow on a tie. Each of twelve crawler names is asked one question: may it fetch /products/ ? A store counts as blocking a crawler when the answer is no. A second reading looks at the product page for a meta name="robots" tag carrying noai or noimageai . Readings were taken between 29 August and 2 September 2026. Every store that blocked at least one crawler, or carried the tag, is one row in the CSV at the end. The rest of the corpus blocked nothing and is the denominator. What this cannot see. A robots.txt is a request. A store can also block a crawler at the edge, with a bot-management rule or a firewall, and that block is invisible here because the scanner is not the crawler being blocked. Every count below is a floor. Result 133 of 10,099 stores block at least one crawler: 1.32%. Crawler What it feeds Fetches at answer time Stores blocking CCBot Common Crawl no 81 GPTBot OpenAI training & retrieval no 77 Bytespider TikTok / Doubao no 72 Amazonbot Alexa+ / Rufus no 60 Google-Extended AI Overviews & AI Mode grounding no 58 ClaudeBot Claude retrieval & citations no 53 Applebot-Extended Apple Intelligence no 48 meta-externalagent Meta AI no 47 ChatGPT-User Live fetches during a ChatGPT chat yes 11 PerplexityBot Perplexity search & shopping yes 10 OAI-SearchBot ChatGPT search & shopping results yes 6 Perplexity-User Live fetches when a Perplexity user asks yes 3 "Fetches at answer time" marks