WooCommerce AI Storefront

Make your WooCommerce catalog discoverable by AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot) while keeping checkout, customer data, and brand experience under merchant control.

Core principle: AI agents discover and recommend. The merchant owns the transaction.

Status: active prototype-phase development. Iterating fast; expect frequent releases. Every release ships with full test coverage and a detailed CHANGELOG entry. Cadence will slow as the plugin enters the hardening phase. See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup and conventions.

What it does

Publishes three discovery surfaces that AI crawlers consume:

• /llms.txt — Markdown store guide (categories, featured products, attribution instructions)
• /.well-known/ucp — JSON manifest declaring capabilities, checkout policy (web-redirect only), and purchase URL templates
• Enhanced JSON-LD on product pages — Schema.org Product augmented with BuyAction, inventory, attributes, shipping details

Plus integrations with WordPress and WooCommerce:

• robots.txt — per-crawler allowlist for 12 commerce-relevant AI bots
• Store API rate limiting — built-in WC rate limiter fingerprints AI bots by user-agent (regular customer traffic is unaffected)
• Order Attribution — standard utm_medium=ai_agent capture, surfaced in WooCommerce core's built-in "Origin" column

What it doesn't do

• No delegated payments. Checkout happens on your store.
• No authentication. No API keys to manage.
• No custom rate limiter. Uses WC's built-in with user-agent fingerprinting.
• No Stripe or other payment provider dependency.
• No MCP (Model Context Protocol) abilities registered by AI Storefront yet. WooCommerce core now ships native MCP support starting in WC 10.3.0 (developer preview, gated by the mcp_integration feature flag), with purpose-built abilities for product and order management and a path for third-party plugins to register their own via the WordPress Abilities API. No separate extension needed; the integration is in core, just enable the flag. MCP and UCP serve different audiences and AI Storefront only targets the latter: MCP is admin-side (the merchant's own AI assistants acting on the store from inside the admin), while UCP is transport for external shopping agents discovering the catalog over the public web. Registering AI Storefront-specific MCP abilities (e.g. catalog-taxonomy audit, JSON-LD verification) is on the roadmap; until then, merchants on WC 10.3+ who enable the flag can already use AI assistants to read and edit products and categories directly via WC's own abilities.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.7+
• WooCommerce 9.9+
• PHP 8.0+

Installation

See readme.txt for the user-facing installation steps. For development:

git clone <this repo>
cd woocommerce-ai-syndication
npm install && npm run build
composer install

Then symlink or copy the plugin directory into a WordPress install's wp-content/plugins/ and activate through the admin.

Development

npm run build                   # Build frontend bundle
npm run test:js                 # Run JS tests (Jest)
npm run lint:js                 # Lint JS (ESLint via @wordpress/scripts)
vendor/bin/phpunit              # Run PHP tests (PHPUnit + Brain Monkey)
vendor/bin/phpcs                # Lint PHP (WordPress-Extra standard)
vendor/bin/phpcbf               # Auto-fix PHPCS violations
vendor/bin/phpstan analyse      # PHP static analysis (level 5)

CI runs all of the above on every push to main and on pull requests. See .github/workflows/ci.yml.

Documentation

• For merchants — docs/user-guide/USER-GUIDE.md: install, enable, configure, verify endpoints, read attribution stats, troubleshoot.
• For developers — docs/engineering/: architecture, UCP buy flow, API reference, data model, testing strategy.
• Doc index — docs/README.md.

Architecture

See docs/engineering/ARCHITECTURE.md for a detailed architecture overview, file map, and design decisions. (AGENTS.md at the repo root is a pointer for AI coding agents and links here.)

In brief:

• Discovery layer — three stateless generators (LlmsTxt, Ucp, JsonLd) emit the public surfaces. Event-driven cache invalidation on product/category/settings changes keeps them fresh.
• Attribution — hooks into WooCommerce Order Attribution to capture AI-referred orders; no custom checkout flow.
• Rate limiting — configures WC's built-in Store API rate limiter via woocommerce_store_api_rate_limit_options / _id filters.
• Admin UI — React app built with @wordpress/components and @wordpress/data. Color tokens are centralized in client/settings/ai-syndication/tokens.js.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests welcome. Please:

1. Run the full quality gate (phpunit, phpcs, phpstan, test:js, lint:js) before opening a PR.
2. Include tests for new behavior. PHP tests use Brain Monkey (no WordPress install required).
3. Follow the styling rules in AGENTS.md — design tokens via tokens.js, component precedence rules for @wordpress/components vs. @woocommerce/components.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE if present, or the GPL at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html.