What the error means
Your robots.txt disallows one or more of the crawlers that assistants use, so those assistants cannot read your catalogue and will not cite your products.
Why Google rejects it
Most stores never chose this. A blanket disallow written for scrapers catches GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot as collateral, and the agents differ in what they do: some fetch for training, some fetch to answer a live question with a link back. Blocking the second kind removes you from answers that would have sent traffic.
How to fix it
- Read your robots.txt and find which agents are disallowed. The rules that match an agent most specifically win, so a broad allow does not override a narrow block.
- Decide per agent rather than in one sweep. Search-time agents that cite sources are worth allowing even if you refuse training crawlers.
- On Shopify, robots.txt comes from a template you can edit — the rules are not fixed.
- Remember robots.txt is not the only gate. Bot protection at the CDN can refuse an agent that robots.txt allows.
Shipwork reads your robots.txt and resolves the rules for nine named AI agents the way each one does, then tells you which are allowed and which are refused. Free, no account, no signup — paste your store address.
Check my storeGo deeper: Robots.txt for AI crawlers
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