Who builds this
I'm Ryan Bowne, the founder of ShelfScore. I've spent 12 years building software across ecommerce, marketing infrastructure, and creator tools, and ShelfScore is what happens when that experience meets a problem nobody else was auditing properly.
The work itself runs on the audit engine. Every week it checks your store against more than twenty signals across bot access, schema, and product data, ranks what to fix by recoverable points, and tracks whether your score is climbing. That engine is the muscle. My job is to keep it correct, keep it sharp as the AI platforms change, and answer you directly when you need a human.
ShelfScore operates as Downtown Bowne, LLC, based in Miami, FL. It is founder-led by design. When you email support@getshelfscore.com, you reach the person who built that engine, not a tier-one queue, and most replies go out within four hours on weekdays. That is not a constraint of being lean. It is the standard, because the person who understands your store's AI readiness best should be the one answering you.
Why this app exists
In late 2025, I watched AI shopping engines start making real product recommendations. ChatGPT Shopping launched. Perplexity Shopping launched. Google AI Overviews started citing specific products. Shopify announced UCP partnership with Google at NRF 2026.
The thing nobody was saying out loud: most Shopify stores are invisible to these AI engines for structural reasons that are fixable in an afternoon. robots.txt blocks the AI crawlers. JSON-LD is missing return policy schema. Product variants aren't linked with ProductGroup. The fixes are simple. Knowing what to fix, in what order, against your actual store, is the hard part.
ShelfScore exists to make that diagnosis honest, fast, and affordable. The free tier audits your full store. $49 unlocks per-product detail and weekly re-audits. $349 supports agencies managing client stores. No credits. No per-product fees. No cold sales calls.
What we believe about building software for Shopify merchants
Merchants are busy.The job of a Shopify app is to deliver value before it asks for money. ShelfScore's free tier shows your composite score, three sub-scores, and top three priority fixes. That's enough to fix your store yourself if you want to. The paid tiers exist for merchants who want per-product detail, weekly monitoring, score history, multi-store management, or agency-grade reporting, not as a paywall in front of value the free tier should include.
We don't believe in dark patterns.ShelfScore's billing goes through Shopify's billing API. Cancellation is one click in your Shopify admin. We don't ask for credit cards on the free tier. We don't run "your trial ends in 24 hours" countdown emails. If a merchant uninstalls, the uninstall webhook captures the reason and I read every one.
We don't believe in unverifiable claims.Every check in the ShelfScore audit maps to a published spec: schema.org for JSON-LD, the robots.txt convention for crawler access, Google Merchant Center documentation for product feed completeness. We don't audit against marketing terms we invented.
We don't believe in attacking competitors.There are other AI visibility tools on the Shopify App Store. Some of them are good. ShelfScore is the choice for merchants who want honest auditing against real specs at flat-rate pricing. That's the offer. Compare openly. Choose what fits.
How to reach me
Email: ryan@getshelfscore.com
Support: support@getshelfscore.com
If you install ShelfScore and something is broken, email me. If you have a feature request, email me. If you're an agency evaluating the Agency tier, email me.
ShelfScore is founder-led and built to scale through the product, not through a wall of support tiers. You get a direct line to the person accountable for it.