SKAW app is now free for all Shopify merchants!
SKAW is Now Free for Shopify Merchants — Plus How AI Agents Are Changing the Game
Welcome back, Rankers! It’s been another big week, and if you’re a Shopify merchant, I’ve got some great news for you.
SKAW is Now Free
SKAW is now completely free for all Shopify merchants. With it, you get full access to AI agent activity on your site — what products the bots are looking at and, interestingly, which products they’re visiting most frequently. That last point has been a fascinating one to dig into. We’ve noticed that some bots frequent one particular product far more than others, and we’re still investigating why that is.
Why I Built SKAW
One of the core reasons I built SKAW was to get a clear picture of what AI bots are actually doing on a site. We hear a lot of talk about SEO, AEO, GEO, and every other acronym under the sun, but the real question is: are the bots actually visiting your site? Are they seeing all of your products? Right now, there’s no elegant way to get that answer directly from the large language models themselves, because they hallucinate and can be inconsistent. SKAW gives you a concrete answer — if a bot visited a page, you know they’ve seen it and know it exists.
From there, you can start asking the more important questions. If you’re not getting traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google, or wherever, to a particular page — what’s wrong with it? That’s the next level of what SKAW does: it shows you how to improve those product pages to make them more AI-friendly and AI-ready.
Simple Fixes with Big Results
A lot of what SKAW surfaces comes down to simple issues. For example, we’ve found that many clients have very short product descriptions — sometimes just 15 words. Even for something like a bearing kit, there’s a lot more you can say. We updated a description for one client and almost immediately started seeing more organic traffic from Google. This is important to note: the things you do to make your pages better for AI agents also benefit your traditional Google rankings, because Google is essentially seeing the same information.
How the Workflow Comes Together
The workflow I’ve built around SKAW goes like this. SKAW generates a prompt based on what it finds. You can take that prompt and give it to Sidekick — Shopify’s own AI assistant — which can then help you edit the page, write new descriptions, suggest meta fields, and recommend product category types.
But you can also take that prompt and feed it to your own agent. I personally give it to Hermes, my own AI agent which is currently running GPT 5.4 as its main model. Using the Shopify AI Toolkit, Hermes can go and fix these things at scale.
A Real-World Example
Let me give you a concrete example of how this played out just last week. We ran a SKAW check on a particular client and noticed some issues with the Google Ads feed. I took the SKAW prompt and gave it to Hermes. Because Hermes has the Shopify AI Toolkit connected, it was able to look at the full report, confirm the issues, and start addressing them. But then it surfaced something we hadn’t initially spotted — a bigger, related problem that turned out to affect about a thousand products.
That was my first real use of the Shopify AI Toolkit, so I was carefully checking each step along the way. Since then, I’ve built a dedicated skill into Hermes for handling those kinds of tasks, and every time I complete a new task, a new skill gets added. The agent is genuinely improving over time and getting better at what it does.
Just yesterday, based on something I spotted in SKAW, I asked Hermes to do a health check on a specific element for one client. It produced the report, then asked if I wanted it to do the same for all my other Shopify clients. I said yes, and within 10 minutes I had accurate reports across the board. I’ve checked them — they’re solid. Some things were flagged that needed to be flagged, and that’s exactly the point.
Agents Are Becoming Personal Assistants
I was talking to a client today about exactly this. He’s using AI extensively in his business — retiring old manual processes, using Claude Code to build scripts that automate inventory management and internal reporting. It’s all scheduled for him. That’s the real beauty of having your own agent: when it gets smarter over time and already knows your business, you can schedule recurring jobs. Want a report in your inbox every Monday morning? You can do that.
My concern with the big platforms is that rules, restrictions, and pricing can change. That’s why I run a dual setup — I still have a ChatGPT account and Claude accounts, and our team runs on a Claude Teams account where every member has their own personalised agent built with skills specific to their role. It’s like having a genuinely smart personal assistant that knows what you need and gets things done.
The memory I’ve built into Hermes is now more useful than what’s available in Claude Code alone. When Hermes offered to run checks across all my Shopify clients, it already knew where each client was, knew their names, knew their Shopify store details — and it just went and did it.
AI Isn’t Taking Jobs — It’s Creating Opportunity
As I said to my client today, I don’t see AI taking away our jobs. I am busier than ever. So is he — he told me he’s up until 2am coding, and that’s the story for a lot of people running their own businesses right now. They can see the opportunity and they’re moving fast to take it.
I’d really encourage you to get in and use these tools. If you’re on Shopify, I’d love to know what you think of SKAW. You can download it from the banner below. Any feedback and any suggestions for improvements are always welcome — I’m pushing out updates constantly based on my own experience with it. Let me know how you get on. You can reach me at [email protected].
Thanks very much, and please remember to like, share, and subscribe. I really appreciate all the support. See you next time!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
