Shopify Admin Agentic Crawler Access

Purpose

If your robots.txt doesn't address the AI crawlers by name — or worse, disallows them — assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity may never read your store, so you simply don't exist to AI shoppers. Shopify generates robots.txt from a theme template (templates/robots.txt.liquid); this skill reads that template and appends explicit allow rules for the major AI user-agents (with a clear, idempotent managed block) so foundational models and AI search are permitted to crawl your pages. Fixes the agentiq.report finding robots-ai-rules.

Prerequisites

• Authenticated Shopify CLI session (shopify auth login --store <domain>)
• Required API scopes: read_themes, write_themes

Parameters

All skills accept these universal parameters:

Skill-specific parameters:

Safety

⚠️ Step 2 (themeFilesUpsert) modifies a file in the LIVE published theme. A malformed robots.txt.liquid can de-index the store from ALL search engines. This skill writes only inside a clearly-delimited # BEGIN agentic-crawler-access … # END managed block (re-running replaces just that block, never your other rules), defaults dry_run: true, and recommends duplicating the theme first. Review the full proposed file before setting dry_run: false.

Workflow Steps

1. OPERATION: themes — query Inputs: roles: [MAIN] (unless theme_id given), then theme.files(filenames: ["templates/robots.txt.liquid"]) Expected output: Current robots.txt.liquid content (or absence — Shopify uses a default if the template doesn't exist).

2. COMPUTE (no API): construct the new template. If no custom template exists, start from the Shopify default ({{ robots.default_groups }}) and append the managed block with User-agent:/Allow: / stanzas for each agent in agents. If a managed block already exists, replace only it. Emit the full proposed file diff.

3. OPERATION: themeFilesUpsert — mutation Inputs: themeId, files: [{ filename: "templates/robots.txt.liquid", body: { type: TEXT, value: <new content> } }] (skipped when dry_run or mode: audit). Expected output: Upserted theme file; collect userErrors.

GraphQL Operations

# themes:query — validated against api_version 2025-01
query CrawlerThemeFile {
  themes(first: 1, roles: [MAIN]) {
    nodes {
      id
      name
      files(filenames: ["templates/robots.txt.liquid"]) {
        nodes {
          filename
          body { ... on OnlineStoreThemeFileBodyText { content } }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

# themeFilesUpsert:mutation — validated against api_version 2025-01
mutation CrawlerAllowUpsert($themeId: ID!, $files: [OnlineStoreThemeFilesUpsertFileInput!]!) {
  themeFilesUpsert(themeId: $themeId, files: $files) {
    upsertedThemeFiles { filename }
    userErrors { filename code message }
  }
}

Managed block written into templates/robots.txt.liquid (after {{ robots.default_groups }}):

# BEGIN agentic-crawler-access (managed by shopify-admin-agentic-crawler-access)
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /
# ... one stanza per agent in `agents`
# END agentic-crawler-access

Session Tracking

Claude MUST emit the following output at each stage. This is mandatory.

On start, emit:

╔══════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║  SKILL: <skill name>                         ║
║  Store: <store domain>                       ║
║  Started: <YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM UTC>             ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════╝

After each step, emit:

[N/TOTAL] <QUERY|MUTATION>  <OperationName>
          → Params: <brief summary of key inputs>
          → Result: <count or outcome>

If dry_run: true, prefix every mutation step with [DRY RUN] and do not execute it.

On completion, emit:

For format: human (default):

══════════════════════════════════════════════
OUTCOME SUMMARY
  <Metric label>:   <value>
  Errors:           0
  Output:           <filename or "none">
══════════════════════════════════════════════

For format: json, emit:

{
  "skill": "<skill-slug>",
  "store": "<domain>",
  "started_at": "<ISO8601>",
  "completed_at": "<ISO8601>",
  "dry_run": false,
  "steps": [
    {
      "step": 1,
      "operation": "<OperationName>",
      "type": "query",
      "params_summary": "<string>",
      "result_summary": "<string>",
      "skipped": false
    }
  ],
  "outcome": {
    "metric_key": 0,
    "errors": 0,
    "output_file": null
  }
}

Output Format

human: the before/after robots.txt.liquid and the list of agents now allowed. json: { theme_id, agents_allowed:[...], wrote: true|false, errors }.

Error Handling

Best Practices

• Duplicate the published theme before writing (Online Store → Themes → Duplicate) so you can roll back instantly.
• Keep dry_run: true until you've read the entire proposed file — a broken robots.txt.liquid can de-index the whole store.
• Use the managed-block markers; never hand-merge — re-running the skill then cleanly updates only its own block.
• Allowing AI crawlers ≠ giving away content; it's permission to read public pages the same way Googlebot does. Pair with shopify-admin-agentic-llms-txt so crawlers also get a guided summary.