The search basics most stores drop, and why AI tools care too
Six ordinary checks carry 25 of your store's 100 points. They are old ground for search engines, and the AI tools reading your store lean on them too.
You have probably been told that AI changes everything and the old search work no longer matters. Then you run a scan and find a quarter of your score sitting in six checks that people have been nagging store owners about since long before any of this started.
That is not us padding the number. Some AI search features are built on ordinary search systems, so the same groundwork still matters there. Google says this directly in its published guidance for AI search: its usual search practices remain relevant, and there is no special AI file or separate track to get on (Google's AI search guidance). Other AI tools may use different systems, so the six checks below are a sound baseline rather than a rule for every assistant.
Here are the six, in the order of how many points they carry, with what each one is, why it matters, and how to check it yourself.
1. Titles and descriptions, 5 points
Every page on your store can carry its own title and a short line of description written to summarise it. Done well, someone scanning a page of search results knows what your page holds before clicking. Left blank or copied across every product, that summary has to be guessed from whatever text happens to be lying around on the page.
This matters more than it looks. The title and description give software short clues about what the page contains. Google uses the title alongside headings, visible text, and links when it builds a result title, and it sometimes uses the description when that is the clearest summary. They are useful signals, not a promise that either one gets read first or shown unchanged (Google's title guidance, Google's description guidance).
<title> and another beginning <meta name="description". If the title is just your store's name, or the description line is empty or identical on every product, that page is not saying what it sells.
2. Sitemap, 5 points
A sitemap is a file listing the pages you want search engines to know about. AI search features built on a search index can benefit from that same discovery route. It exists because following links does not always find everything. An older product, a category buried three clicks deep, or a page your theme stopped linking to can be missed by software that only follows links.
Most store platforms build one automatically. Check the result anyway. A broken update or a wrong setting can leave recent products out, even when the file itself still loads.
3. A secure address, 5 points
A secure address starts with https and appears as a secure connection in your browser's site controls. It means the traffic between a visitor and your store is scrambled on the way, so somebody sitting in between cannot read or alter it easily. Nearly every store has this available now. The check that matters is whether every visitor actually ends up on the secure version, or whether some quietly land on the old unprotected one.
Google has used secure pages as a search signal since 2014, and it recommends sending every visitor to the secure version. The redirect also stops the secure and unprotected addresses competing as two copies of the same page (Google's HTTPS guidance). Other AI tools do not all publish how they treat this signal.
4. One main address, 4 points
Most stores accidentally offer the same product at several different web addresses. A filter, a link tag from an email campaign, or a stray slash on the end turns one product into three: yourstore.com/product, yourstore.com/product?ref=email, yourstore.com/product/. To you these are obviously the same page. To software, they are three pages that happen to say the same thing, which raises the question of which one is the real one.
A single line in the page names which address you prefer. Google can still choose a different main address, but the line is a strong signal and helps combine links and avoid wasting visits on copies (Google's duplicate-address guidance). Other AI tools do not all publish how they handle duplicate addresses.
rel="canonical". The address on that line should point to the clean product address without ?test=1. If the line is missing or points somewhere else, fixing it usually needs a developer or your search plugin's settings.
5. Headings, 3 points
Headings are the way a page announces its own structure, one clear main heading at the head of the page, then smaller headings beneath it in order, like a contents list built into the page itself. Done well, a shopper scanning knows exactly which section they are in. Done by picking headings for their size rather than their place in the order, that shortcut disappears for everyone.
Clear headings help people scan a page and help screen readers move through it. Google recommends organising pages with useful headings, while also saying that perfect page code is not required for its AI search features. A clear order removes ambiguity, but it is not a published requirement shared by every AI tool.
<h1. Our scan expects one clear main heading as a simple consistency check. None means the page has no main heading marked that way. More than one deserves a review, but it is not an automatic Google search failure.
6. Image descriptions, 3 points
An image description is a short line of text attached to a picture saying what is in it. A shopper using a screen reader hears that line instead of seeing the photo. Software can also use it as one clue about the picture. Some tools can inspect images directly, and Google says it combines image descriptions with computer vision and the rest of the page (Google's image guidance).
A meaningful product photo with no description gives a screen reader user no useful account of what it shows, and gives other software one less clue. Decorative images are the exception and should have an empty description, because they add no information (W3C's decorative image guidance).
<img> line for alt="" or no alt at all. Either way, that image is telling nobody anything.
Check your own store
You do not need to work through all six by hand. The free scan checks every one of them on your store and tells you which are working, which are half done, and which are missing, in less time than it took to read this far. No plugin, no card, no signup. Run the free scan.
Why the small points are worth your afternoon
It is tempting to look at 75 points of AI checks and 25 points of these, and conclude the small ones can wait. Two reasons they should not.
The first is that they are cheap. Most of the six are settings, not projects. A missing description is a text box. A stale sitemap is usually a plugin setting. Compared with the work behind the larger AI checks, these are the points you can collect this afternoon.
The second is that they are foundational rather than separate. Each one removes a known search, security, or accessibility problem. AI tools do not all use these signals in the same way, but fixing them improves the page and the search systems that several AI experiences build on. It does not replace the product work.
None of this promises a particular result, and nobody outside the AI companies decides what gets mentioned to a shopper. What these six do is remove plain, well-documented problems for people and search engines, including the search systems behind some AI experiences. Run the free scan to see where your own store stands on all six today.