Shopify Catalog requirements: why products get left out

AI shopping channels like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot read your products through Shopify Catalog. If a product isn’t in the catalog, those channels can’t get it from Shopify at all. Inclusion is automatic, but only for stores and products that meet a short list of requirements.

Here’s the whole list, taken from Shopify’s requirements page, with where to check each one.

Store-level requirements

These apply to your whole store. If one fails, none of your products are included.

1. Starter plan or higher

Shopify’s wording: “Your store must be on the Starter plan or higher.” Check under Settings > Plan.

If your store is still on a trial or is paused, treat this one as unmet until you’re on a paid plan. Stores on Shopify’s Agentic plan are a special case, covered below.

2. Not in private mode

The same line continues: “your store can’t be in private mode.” Private mode is what Shopify now calls the storefront password. When it’s on, “all of your online store’s pages are hidden from visitors and search engines” (Online store access).

Check the access menu on the Online Store page of your admin. It shows Private or Public. New stores start in private mode, so a store that has never launched is the most common case.

3. Terms and policy standing

Your store “must comply with Shopify’s Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.” Shopify also lists account-standing steps that affect eligibility, which it says is “reviewed over time”:

• Verify your email address, turn on two-step authentication, and set up a passkey if available.
• Complete identity and business verification when prompted.
• Keep a track record of genuine sales, fulfill orders promptly, and keep your chargeback rate low.
• Pay Shopify invoices on time, keep Shopify Payments in good standing, and resolve open policy issues.

Shopify doesn’t publish thresholds for any of these. If everything else on this list checks out and your products still aren’t included, standing is the likely reason, and only Shopify can tell you more.

Product-level requirements

These apply one product at a time. A store can have most of its products in the catalog and a few left out.

4. A title and at least one image

“Your products must have a title and at least 1 product image.” A product imported with a broken image URL, or created as a placeholder, fails here.

5. A price above zero

“Your products must have a price greater than zero. Free products aren’t included in Shopify Catalog.” Samples, free gifts and $0 add-ons are left out by design. If a paid product shows $0 because a variant price never got set, that’s worth fixing.

6. Published to a sales channel the catalog reads

Products “must be published to your online store, Hydrogen, or Headless channels.” Check the Publishing card on the product page. A product that’s active but not published to the Online Store is easy to miss after a bulk import.

If you run a headless storefront, there’s an extra rule: “you must use the correct format for routes to be included.” Shopify links to its route format docs for the details.

7. An identifiable product URL

“Your products must be published with an identifiable product URL.” For most stores this comes with requirement 6. It matters most for headless setups, where product pages live outside Shopify’s theme.

8. Not Unlisted, and not hidden from search engines

“Your products can’t have Unlisted status or be hidden from search engines.” Shopify’s agentic storefronts page names the two ways a product gets hidden: the Unlisted status, or the seo.hidden metafield (Managing agentic storefronts). If you or an app ever set seo.hidden to keep a page out of Google, it keeps that product out of the catalog too.

Draft and archived products aren’t published, so they’re out for the same reason.

9. No sensitive content

“Your products can’t contain sensitive content, such as mature content.” Shopify doesn’t list categories beyond that example.

The Agentic plan exception

Shopify’s Agentic plan is for brands that don’t run their store on Shopify. It “has no monthly subscription fee” and lets those brands put products into the catalog without a Shopify online store (Agentic plan).

Two requirements change for it. The private mode rule doesn’t block an Agentic plan store that hasn’t published its online store, and products without a Shopify online store “must include the external product URL.” If you already run your store on Shopify, none of this applies to you.

Eligible isn’t the same as visible

Meeting every requirement gets a product into the catalog. It doesn’t get it shown. Shopify says inclusion “doesn’t guarantee that a product will appear in a specific AI answer, be ranked in a specific position, or be displayed by every channel” (Shopify Catalog).

Each channel also has its own conditions on top. ChatGPT, for example, needs your store to sell to US customers and to have terms, privacy and refund policies filled in (Selling on ChatGPT). For the channel-by-channel version, see Shopify products not showing in ChatGPT?.

Things that don’t affect catalog inclusion

• robots.txt. Shopify says blocking AI crawlers “affects only open-web discoverability. It doesn’t stop your product data from being sent by Shopify Catalog to the agentic storefronts that you’ve activated” (Shopify Catalog and product discovery).
• llms.txt or agents.md files. Shopify serves these automatically and says they’re “separate from Shopify Catalog” and “don’t replace any Shopify Catalog capabilities.”
• A separate feed app. Shopify builds the catalog from your product data. You don’t submit a feed to it. (Google is the exception on the channel side: Shopify’s Google AI Mode and Gemini channel uses Merchant Center.)

A quicker way to check

Going product by product through the admin is slow once a store has more than a few dozen products. We built a check into Hearsay for this. When the app finds none of your products in the catalog, it reads your plan and your storefront’s private mode setting, then checks the status, image, price, publishing and search visibility of up to 1,000 products. It lists what’s blocking each one, with a link to that product in your admin. It can’t see account standing, since Shopify doesn’t expose it.

The free scan on our home page also tells you how many of your products it found in Shopify’s AI catalog, which is a fast first answer to “am I in at all?”