Shopify robots.txt.liquid, sitemap and llms.txt for AI search

How Shopify generates robots.txt

Shopify writes a robots.txt for every store. The default rules let crawlers reach products, collections, pages and blogs, and block admin, cart, checkout, account and order URLs plus sorted or filtered collection URLs that duplicate other pages. A live default file (Allbirds' store, for example) adds a separate group for Google's ad bot and a Sitemap: line pointing at /sitemap.xml, and has no groups for AI crawlers, so GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot follow the same rules as everyone else.

Editing robots.txt.liquid

To change the file you add a theme template, not a text file:

1. In Shopify admin go to Online Store, open the menu next to your theme and choose Edit code.
2. Click Add a new template, select robots, then Create template.
3. Edit the Liquid and save it in the published theme.

The template only gets a few Liquid objects: robots.default_groups (Shopify's current rules), group, rule, user_agent, sitemap and request. Keep the loop that prints the default groups so you inherit Shopify's future updates, and add your own groups as plain text after it:

{% for group in robots.default_groups %}
  {{- group.user_agent }}

  {%- for rule in group.rules -%}
    {{ rule }}
  {%- endfor -%}

  {%- if group.sitemap != blank -%}
    {{ group.sitemap }}
  {%- endif -%}
{% endfor %}

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

Shopify's warnings are worth reading twice: support will not help with edits, a mistake can cost you all search traffic, and a theme uploaded through the admin does not carry the template over. Delete the template (right-click robots.txt.liquid > Delete permanently) to go back to the default. Then check the live file with the robots.txt checker.

Shopify sitemap

Every store has a sitemap index at /sitemap.xml that links product, collection, blog and page sitemaps; product entries include the main image. It updates on its own. On the Basic plan or higher each international domain gets its own sitemap, and languages you sell in are added automatically. To submit it, verify the domain in Google Search Console (Shopify suggests the HTML tag in theme.liquid), open Indexing > Sitemaps, enter sitemap.xml and submit. Google cannot read it while the store is password protected.

llms.txt and agents.md on Shopify

Shopify now manages an /agents.md for every store, served at the bare primary domain. Its default content points AI agents to the store's UCP discovery and MCP endpoints, read-only product, collection and search URLs, and published policies. The same content is served at /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt. Since May 2026 you can override each path with agents.md.liquid, llms.txt.liquid or llms-full.txt.liquid; these templates only see the request and agents objects. Shopify recommends keeping the managed default unless you need custom instructions, because it keeps endpoints current. If you want a buyer-facing summary of your catalog, our llms.txt generator for Shopify drafts one you can paste into a template.

Structured data

Themes print JSON-LD with the structured_data Liquid filter, which returns a schema.org Product (or ProductGroup for products with variants) or Article. Check a product URL with Google's Rich Results Test, since older themes may still use hand-written markup. For the wider picture of how stores get picked in AI answers, see GEO for Shopify and product schema.