Frequently asked questions

Octolift is a Shopify app that scores how well each of your products can be found, understood and recommended by AI shopping assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and then shows you exactly what to change.

It runs inside your Shopify admin and reads your products through Shopify. It is made by Craftshift, a Shopify Partner, and has been on the Shopify App Store since August 2026. Nothing is written to your store until you approve a specific change.

Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) are the practice of preparing product listings so AI assistants and answer engines can quote and recommend them, the way search engine optimization prepares pages for Google.

Octolift measures that readiness per product with an AI visibility score and helps you improve it.

No. Scoring, the Shopify catalog checks, AI rankings and the agentic sales figures are all read only.

A product is only updated when you press Save, or press Apply all suggestions and confirm, and only the fields you changed are written. A store answer on the Knowledge base page is only saved once you approve it. What you applied is listed under Improvements on the product's row on the Products page, where most changes have an Undo button.

No. Nothing is edited in your theme and nothing has to be installed on your storefront. Scores, suggestions, AI rankings and agentic sales all work through Shopify's API.

It asks ChatGPT and Gemini what they recommend, which is different from a fixed position. Each question you ask on the AI rankings page goes to both, and Octolift records the products they name and in what order, so you can see whether your store is among them and who is picked if it is not.

What Octolift does not do is report a fixed position inside those assistants: their answers change between runs and vary by country, so such a number would look precise while meaning nothing. Alongside the assistants it searches Shopify's global AI catalog, the catalog AI agents read through Shopify's agentic commerce tools, where a position in the top 10 is real and repeatable. See AI rankings.

Shopper questions are checked on ChatGPT and Gemini, and as a live search of Shopify's AI catalog. ChatGPT is asked with web search on and Gemini with Google Search grounding, for the country you choose.

Separately, the agentic sales figures cover the AI channels Shopify's own analytics credits: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Shop.

Yes. Suggestions are written in the language of your existing listing, and the shopper questions Octolift generates are written in the main language of the country being checked. The app interface itself is in English.

Any Shopify merchant who wants to be recommended when a shopper asks an assistant for a product like theirs: brands with a catalog worth explaining, stores whose products have specs that assistants compare, and anyone who has seen AI assistants show up in their sales channels and wants more of it. It works on every Shopify plan.

Install Octolift from the Shopify App Store, press Analyze products on the Home page and choose a product. You get a score, a breakdown of what to fix, and how the product appears in the Shopify catalog that AI assistants read.

Then press Improve with AI to generate suggestions, review them and save the ones you want. What ChatGPT and Gemini answer to a shopper's question has its own page, AI rankings. The Free plan is enough for a first round. The full walkthrough is in Getting started.

Start with the products you most want AI assistants to recommend: bestsellers and the ones shoppers ask about.

The Products page opens on Analyzed, every product with a score. Needs work narrows it to the weak and critical ones with nothing applied yet, weakest first, Improved shows what you have already changed, and All products lists the rest of your catalog.

Yes. Press Analyze products and choose Select products, Select collections or All products, up to 1,000 products in one run. Before anything runs, the dialog shows how many products will be analyzed and how many your plan has room for.

The products are then analyzed one by one in the background while you carry on, and a card on Home and Products shows the progress, with a Cancel button and the results when it is done. Collections and All products take active products only: a draft or archived product is published nowhere, so there is nothing for an assistant to find.

There are three reasons. A product your plan has no room for is skipped, and the dialog says how many before you start. A product whose listing has not changed since its last analysis is not analyzed again, because the result would be the same. And if this month's AI allowance runs out part way, the remaining products are skipped.

To analyze one unchanged product again anyway, open it and press Reanalyze.

Usually a few seconds to about half a minute. The app fetches the product, runs the checks, has the AI rater score the text and asks the Shopify catalog whether the product is discoverable, all at the same time. Suggestions take a little longer, because each draft is scored and polished before you see it.

Yes. Anyone you give access to the app in your Shopify admin can use every feature, including applying changes. The plan belongs to the store, not to a person.

The AI visibility score is a number from 0 to 100 built from 12 checks in two halves. Listing quality covers what you write and structure: the description, title, category, category fields and variant attributes. Agent readiness covers what Shopify's AI catalog returns for the product: whether it is found at all, the core fields, variant prices, policy links, availability, media and reviews.

The score breakdown shows what each check found and what would earn the missing points. See How scoring works.

They are rating bands on the 0 to 100 score. Strong means the listing is well optimized, Good means solid visibility, Weak means it is missing key signals, and Critical means it needs attention. The thresholds are the same for every store.

One fixed model rates every store, and Octolift chooses it, so there is nothing to pick and nothing to tune. That is deliberate: scores are only comparable over time, between products and between stores if one rater produced them all.

Octolift changes the model only when a better one earns its place, and that never changes a score you already have.

The Agent readiness half comes from Shopify's AI catalog, which moves on its own: a product that just synced, went out of stock or gained reviews scores differently the next time it is analyzed. The text checks are cached and only judged again when the listing text changes.

A product's page opens on its last analysis, with its date, for as long as the product is unchanged. Press Reanalyze there for a fresh one.

It means Shopify's AI catalog did not return your product when Octolift searched for it in your store, so an assistant cannot recommend it. Common reasons: the online store is password protected, the product is new or was just changed and has not synced yet, the product is not active, or it is not available in the checked market.

Confirm the storefront is public and the product is active, give Shopify some time to sync, then analyze again.

The app could not reach Shopify's AI catalog while analyzing, so the scan is incomplete and is not saved: your product list keeps the last full score. This is a temporary problem; press Reanalyze in a moment for the full score.

The check looks for the four policy pages Shopify exposes to AI agents: refund policy, shipping policy, privacy policy and terms of service. Points are proportional to how many of the four are published. Add the missing ones under Settings → Policies in your Shopify admin.

At least three images, each with alt text, earns full points. Fewer images, or images without alt text, earn half, and a product with no images earns nothing. Alt text is edited on the product's media in the Shopify admin.

The check counts the reviews Shopify's AI catalog reports for the product, which are the reviews Shopify itself holds for it. Reviews that live only inside a third party app and never reach Shopify are invisible to the catalog, and so to AI agents.

It checks whether your variant option values are specific enough for an assistant to match a shopper's request. Navy and 42 are specific; Default Title, Option 1 or Style A are not. All values specific earns full points, at least half of them earns half, fewer earns nothing.

It suggests a rewritten description, an alternative title (occasionally more than one), values for the category fields that are still empty and, when the product has no category or the current one looks wrong, a category. Each suggestion appears next to what you have now. You pick what to use and can edit it before saving. See Improve with AI.

No, it is instructed not to. A suggestion keeps every factual claim already in your listing and adds no materials, measurements, certifications or other facts that are not there. Category values are only picked when the title or description clearly supports them. Read a suggestion before applying it, as you would any copy.

Only the fields you changed: the title, the description, the category and the category fields you picked, saved in one write that succeeds or fails as a whole. If one part cannot be written, the rest is put back, the product stays exactly as it was, and the message says so. Nothing else on the product is touched.

Octolift never writes SEO titles, meta descriptions, alt text, tags or images. The description is saved as plain paragraphs, so a description that had custom HTML formatting loses that formatting when you replace it.

Yes. On the Products page, press Improvements on the product's row: the latest changes are listed with the value before and after, each with an Undo button. Undoing puts back the exact previous value, as long as you have not edited that field since; if you have, the undo is refused instead of overwriting your work.

A change that cannot be undone from the app says why, for example a category on a product that had none before. Changes are kept for 30 days and then deleted.

Yes, on its own. After a save Octolift analyzes the product again in the background, and the score on the page changes when the new result lands. Shopify's AI catalog can take a while to pick up a change, so the Agent readiness half may follow a little later.

No. A product is counted against your plan the first time you analyze it, and everything after that is included: generating suggestions, regenerating them, applying changes and applying more later.

It is the summary Shopify's AI catalog has built for your product: unique selling points, top features, tech specs and attributes. Assistants quote from this, so a Not specified there is a gap worth filling in your description or category fields.

On the AI rankings page, press Generate questions and pick a product. Octolift writes search phrases a shopper might type for it, from the title, product type and category, in the main language of the country being checked.

Press Check on a suggestion to ask it: a live search of Shopify's AI catalog, where the top ten results are read to see where you rank and which product comes first, plus what ChatGPT and Gemini answer.

Each assistant gets one of three verdicts. Recommended #N means it recommended your product, in that position. Mentioned you, recommended others means it named your store but picked someone else. Recommended none of your products means you were not in the answer.

The Competing brands list then shows which brands were recommended instead, across all your questions.

Ranking mixes many signals: how complete the listing is, popularity, buyer engagement and brand recognition. Listing completeness is the part you can improve directly, so start with the score breakdown and Improve with AI. The rest builds over time.

The catalog answers per buyer country and shipping destination, and shoppers phrase things differently per market. Octolift checks one country at a time, starting with your home market. If you ship to several countries, pick another market in the Country dropdown and press Check to ask the question there.

Every question you ask on the AI rankings page is checked and added to your list for that country, with where your store ranked in the Shopify catalog and what ChatGPT and Gemini answered.

Your plan includes a number of questions. On a paid plan, Check asks a question again, once a week at most, and Check weekly does it for you; on the Free plan each question is checked once. Removing a question frees its place when your plan renews.

Every Shopify store has a public endpoint that AI assistants read to answer questions about the store itself: your shipping, your returns, how to reach you. The Knowledge base asks it the ten questions shoppers ask most and shows you, word for word, what it says back.

Where it comes back with nothing, Octolift can draft an answer from your own policies and shows the sentence each draft came from. Nothing reaches your store until you approve it. See Knowledge base.

They are saved in your own store, in the same place Shopify's Knowledge Base app keeps FAQs, so they belong to your shop rather than to any app and stay if you uninstall Octolift.

They are not shown on your storefront. These answers are what AI assistants and Shopify's own agents read when a shopper asks about your store, so they only ever appear inside an assistant's answer.

Agentic sales are orders that an AI assistant either placed for the shopper or referred to your store, as Shopify's own sales analytics attribute them. Octolift shows the last 30 days on the Home page, and 7, 30 or 90 days on the Agentic sales page, with visits, products and the orders themselves. See Agentic sales.

The channels Shopify's sales data credits: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Shop. The breakdown on the Agentic sales page shows each one.

Shopify does not provide this report for development stores, and Octolift hides the card whenever Shopify does not return the report for a store. If the card shows but says there are no AI assistant sales yet, no orders were attributed to AI channels in that period.

They are an estimate, using Shopify's last click attribution with direct visits left out. AI assistants often open your store without a referrer, so some orders they bring show up as direct traffic and the real total is likely higher. The figures refresh about once an hour.

Shopify requires three policies before a store can sell through an agent: a refund policy, a privacy policy and terms of service. The Settings page in Octolift lists them and says which are still empty, with a link straight to the page in Shopify where you write them.

Your products are a separate matter that Shopify handles: eligible products are added to its AI catalog automatically, and each product's analysis tells you whether the catalog returned it.

Octolift has a Free plan with 5 products and 5 questions, and four paid plans: Starter at $29 a month (100 products, 20 questions), Advanced at $59 (500 products, 40 questions), Premium at $99 (2,000 products, 75 questions) and Enterprise at $199 (10,000 products, 125 questions).

Paid plans are also available yearly at $290, $590, $990 and $1,990, about 17% less. Every plan has every feature, and billing runs through Shopify. See Pricing.

Two things count. Analyzing a product for the first time uses one of your plan's products: that product is then covered for good, and every later scan, suggestion and change to it is included. Asking a new question on the AI rankings page uses one of your plan's questions.

Everything else is included, such as checking your questions again on a paid plan, the Shopify catalog checks and your agentic sales. Deleting a product or undoing an improvement does not give its place back, because the work was done.

The products you have already analyzed stay yours to work on, with nothing further to pay. To take on a product you have not analyzed before, move to a larger plan. The count is not monthly, so there is no renewal date to wait for.

It comes off your product lists within a day, and any question tracked for it is removed. Its place in your plan does not come back, because the AI work on it was done.

Open Plan in the app and press Change plan; Shopify's own plan picker opens. Whatever you pick, you keep every product you have already analyzed; what changes is how many new ones you can add.

To stop paying, pick the Free plan or uninstall the app. Billing is handled by Shopify and appears on your Shopify invoice.

There is a Free plan you can stay on for as long as you like, with 5 products and 5 questions and every feature. If a paid plan you pick comes with a trial, the Plan page in the app shows when the trial ends and when the first charge is taken.

Yes. Each plan includes a monthly amount of AI work, and Octolift limits how many generations and scans a store can run per minute and per day, to keep costs predictable. Normal use never reaches these limits. On the Free plan, reaching the monthly amount pauses AI work until the date shown; moving to a paid plan lifts it right away. AI runs that fail never count against your plan.

Applying a suggestion updates the product's title, description, category or category fields through Shopify, which needs the products write permission. It is only used when you press Save or Apply all suggestions. See Data and privacy.

The product's title, product type, category, category field values and description, and, when the app tests how an assistant would answer a shopper, the catalog's summary of the product and excerpts of your published policy pages. Customer data, orders and your access tokens are never sent to a model provider.

The providers are OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, depending on the job. Octolift uses their paid API tiers, whose terms state that submitted content is not used to train their models.

It never reads your customers. The only order data it uses is what Shopify's own analytics attributes to AI channels: the sales totals, and on the Agentic sales page the orders behind each product (order link, date, assistant and amount). Nothing about the shopper is read or stored.

Access to your store is revoked immediately and all processing stops. Nothing you applied is reverted: the content is yours and stays exactly as it is. About 48 hours later Shopify asks Octolift to erase your store's data, and your scores, change history, tracked questions, generated shopper questions and contact details are deleted.

Press Reload app. That reloads Octolift inside the Shopify admin with a fresh session, which clears almost every temporary error. If it keeps happening, open Support and start a chat, telling us the product you were on and what you pressed.

The AI rater did not return a complete verdict, and Octolift never shows a partial score as if it were final. Wait a moment and press Try again. If it persists for one product, contact us with the product name.

Octolift was updated with a permission it did not have when you installed it. Close the app, open it again from the Apps menu in your Shopify admin, accept the permission prompt Shopify shows, then save again.

Open Support in the app menu and press Chat with us, or email hello@craftshift.com. Include your store URL and the product you were looking at.