Getting a BigCommerce site cited by AI
The five things a report asks for, and where each lives
Checked 2026-09-14. Platforms change what they expose; if one of these is out of date, it is out of date visibly rather than quietly.
- Page titles & meta descriptionsYes
Per product, category and web page, plus store-wide templates under Store Setup.
- JSON-LD schemaYes
The Stencil theme templates, or a snippet in Script Manager scoped to the pages that need it.
- robots.txtYes
Server Settings, where BigCommerce exposes the file directly.
- A plain-text file like /llms.txtNo
No arbitrary root paths: uploaded files are served from the CDN, not from your domain root, so a real /llms.txt needs a proxy in front of the domain. Or skip it — llms.txt is the smallest item on most reports anyway.
- New pages (FAQ, comparison, use case)Yes
The normal page editor.
Faceted navigation multiplies the pages an engine has to read
Filtered category URLs can outnumber your real pages many times over. Crawlers spend their budget on near-identical pages and reach the buying guide you wrote last, or not at all. Check what your robots.txt and canonicals say about filter parameters before adding new content.
Why there is no writer for this platform
No BigCommerce writer is planned. The report's actions land in the right-hand column with the exact control-panel location for each one.
Either way the report splits its actions into two columns: what we publish for you and what only you can do — claiming a directory profile, fixing a Google Business listing, answering the questions a page has been avoiding. The second column has checkboxes, because a re-test run before you have done those is a re-test measuring nothing.
Where to start on BigCommerce
None of this needs an account with us. The AI crawler checker and the Website metadata checker answer the technical questions in about a minute.
- 01
Read robots.txt in Server Settings first
It is the one place BigCommerce lets you lock crawlers out by accident, and the default has changed across store versions.
- 02
Use Script Manager rather than editing every template
Schema added per-page in Script Manager is reversible in one click. A theme edit is not.
- 03
Write the category copy the report asks for
The comparison happens on the category page or it does not happen: two or three paragraphs saying who the category is for and how to choose within it.
Questions
See what the engines say about your BigCommerce site
12 buyer questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. The diagnosis is the same whatever the site is built with — only the fixing differs, and we say which half is which.