Between September 18 and 20, 2026 we gathered 2,120 candidate sites built with AI tools, fetched each one the way a search crawler does, rendered the live ones the way a shopper does, and kept the 234 that are stores: a cart, a checkout, a buy button, or product data. Then we counted.
The first number is the one that matters. 52.6% of those stores hand search engines and AI crawlers an empty page. The median store delivers 12 words of text before JavaScript runs. Google's crawler reads that HTML first, and the crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity read only that; a Vercel and MERJ study found GPTBot fetches JavaScript files a tenth of the time and never executes them. A shopper opening the same page sees products, prices and a cart. The crawler sees a title and a root element.
What else the sample showed
| Measurement, all 234 stores | Result |
|---|---|
| Empty page to crawlers (under 60 words before JavaScript) | 52.6% |
| Median words a crawler receives from the homepage | 12 |
| No sitemap.xml | 84.6% |
| No canonical tag | 82.1% |
| No Product structured data on the homepage | 97.9% |
| Missing or builder-default page title | 3.8% |
| Median critical or serious accessibility failures per page | 6 |
| Largest contentful paint over 2.5 seconds | 18.9% |
| JavaScript errors on page load | 12.4% |
| Advertising trackers firing before any interaction | 7.7% |
| Credential-shaped string in a public JavaScript bundle (408 bundles scanned) | 0.4% |
| Public API key that needs restrictions or row-level security | 28.6% |
Two of those rows are worth reading twice. Product structured data is what puts a price and stock status into a Google result and what an AI assistant parses most reliably; 229 of 234 stores have none on the homepage. And 28.6% ship a public Supabase or Google key in their bundle. That is normal and safe only when the tables behind it have row-level security turned on; in 2025 a researcher found 170 of 1,645 Lovable apps with tables anyone could read. We did not test that, and we never query a store's data. We report the pattern so the owner can check.
Where the stores came from, and what that means
This is a sample, not a census. Sites came from certificate transparency logs for builder-hosted domains and from public code repositories that a builder synced and that contain commerce code. That method finds stores whose owners publish code or use a builder address, and it found almost only Lovable: 229 of the 234. Bolt, v0, Replit and Base44 stores exist, but they do not leave the same public trail, so the by-builder table on the index page shows one row until the sample grows.
It also skews toward older projects. Lovable moved new projects to server-side rendering on May 13, 2026 and added prerendering for older ones, so the empty-page share should fall in later editions. That is the point of publishing the number monthly: the same sites are re-fetched each time, so the trend is like for like.
Why a store owner should care this week
An AI-built store sits between two vendors who have both said in writing that they will not troubleshoot it. Shopify's help page names Lovable, Replit, v0 and Manus as vibe-code partners and states that Shopify Support cannot access or troubleshoot the partner's builder or hosting. The builders, in turn, support the builder, not what search engines make of the output. Nobody is watching whether the page a crawler receives has anything on it.
The fix for the empty page is usually one of three things: turn on the builder's server rendering or prerendering if it offers one, add a sitemap and product data, or, for a builder with no server rendering at all, move the storefront. Which one applies is a five-minute question if you can see what the crawler sees.
Check your own store
The free AI-Built Store Check runs the same measurements on any single store in about a minute: words the crawler sees against words a shopper sees, sitemap, product data, accessibility failures, speed, and credential patterns in your public scripts. No account. It shows you the counts; the Sealed Store Audit shows you where each one is and who can fix it.
The full first edition, the method, and the data file are at index.statusbird.io/studio/index. Aggregate counts may be quoted with attribution and a link. No store is named, on the page or in the data.