If you have a Shopify store, there is a chance your site may not be fully visible to AI bots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.
This often happens because many Shopify sites rely heavily on JavaScript-rendered content. If important content on your site is loaded through JavaScript, some AI crawlers may struggle to read, understand, and index it properly. As a result, your products, collections, blogs, and key site content may not be fully consumed or cited by large language models.
This can negatively affect your performance across AEO, GEO, SEO, and AI visibility.
Alli AI has developed an AI Visibility Engine that helps solve this problem by prerendering your website and serving an HTML version of your site to AI bots when they crawl it. This makes your content easier for LLM crawlers to access, understand, and cite.
By providing a clean, crawlable HTML version of your Shopify site, the AI Visibility Engine can also help speed up the crawling process, allowing AI bots to discover and consume more pages across your site.
To integrate your Shopify site with Alli AI’s AI Visibility Engine, we recommend using the Edge integration method. This setup uses Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront service workers to deliver the prerendered HTML version of your site to AI crawlers.
The final step usually involves switching your nameservers to Cloudflare to complete the integration.
Here is an Article on how to complete the AI Visibility Edge Integration:
Once the Cloudflare setup is complete, the nameservers need to be updated.
For a Shopify site, you usually update nameservers where the domain is registered, not inside the Shopify store.
There are two situations:
1. Domain is registered outside Shopify
Example: GoDaddy, Namecheap, Hostinger, Squarespace, Google Domains, etc.
Steps
Add the domain to Cloudflare
Log in to Cloudflare.
Add the root domain, for example: example.com.
Cloudflare will scan/import your DNS records.
Make sure Shopify DNS records exist in Cloudflare
Add or confirm these records:
Type | Name | Value |
A | @ | 23.227.38.65 |
AAAA | @ | 2620:0127:f00f:5:: |
CNAME | www | shops.myshopify.com |
Shopify lists these as the manual DNS records for third-party domains.
Copy the Cloudflare nameservers
Cloudflare will give you two nameservers, usually like:
xxxx.ns.cloudflare.com
yyyy.ns.cloudflare.com
Log in to your domain registrar
Go to Domain Management or DNS / Nameservers.
Choose Custom nameservers.
Replace the current nameservers with the two Cloudflare nameservers.
Disable DNSSEC before switching
Cloudflare recommends turning off DNSSEC before changing nameservers, then re-enabling it later if needed.
Wait for propagation
Shopify says DNS updates usually happen within about 2 hours, but can take up to 2 days.
In Cloudflare, click Re-check now.
In Shopify, go to Settings → Domains and confirm the domain is connected.
2. Domain was bought through Shopify
Go to:
Shopify Admin → Settings → Domains → Click your domain → DNS settings → Manage
Shopify lets you add, edit, remove, and reset DNS records for Shopify-managed domains.
But for a Cloudflare nameserver switch, be careful: Shopify’s public docs focus on DNS record management for Shopify-managed domains, not full custom nameserver control. If the Shopify domain panel does not show a nameserver option, you would likely need to transfer the domain to another registrar first, then point that registrar to Cloudflare. Shopify provides a “Transfer to another provider” option for Shopify-managed domains.
Important Shopify + Cloudflare warning
For a normal Shopify connection, Shopify warns that Cloudflare proxy / orange-cloud proxying is not supported and can interfere with Shopify SSL and connectivity.
So, unless Alli AI specifically requires otherwise for the Edge integration, keep Shopify DNS records in Cloudflare as DNS only, not proxied:
Gray cloud = DNS only
Orange cloud = proxied
For Alli AI’s AI Visibility Engine, confirm with Alli AI whether their Cloudflare Worker setup needs proxying on the root domain or only specific worker routes. That detail matters.