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Setting up Autopilot rules

Autopilot watches your store catalog and applies fixes automatically once per day. The Autopilot page (/autopilot) ships with a fixed set of rules grouped by category — toggle each one on or off; there is no separate "Add rule" workflow.

Available rules

Each toggle in the Autopilot page corresponds to one capability. All rules respect the same per-shop safety limits described below.

Content

  • Auto Image Compression — converts oversized product images to WebP and replaces the original (productCreateMedia + productDeleteMedia).
  • AI Alt Text Generation — generates descriptive alt text for product images using a vision model.
  • Auto Meta Descriptions — writes SEO meta descriptions where missing.
  • Expand thin pages + fix H1 — drives both content expansion (pages under 300 words) AND meta-title fixes. Internally bound to the fix_h1_tags config column; the label was clarified in phase 256 because the rule does both jobs.

Technical SEO

  • Auto JSON-LD Schema — writes Product / Article / Organization schema via the storefront metafields.seo.jsonld field.
  • Submit to IndexNow — pings Bing/Yandex when content changes (only fires when the IndexNow key file is published at the storefront — see Cooldown).
  • Update LLMs.txt — refreshes /pages/llms-txt when content changes.
  • AI Crawler Access — adds GPTBot/ClaudeBot/PerplexityBot/etc. directives to robots.txt.liquid. Split from "Update LLMs.txt" in phase 264 so merchants can grant one without the other.

Content Studio

  • Blog Auto-Publish — when enabled, every blog_frequency days (default 3) Autopilot picks an untracked target keyword from your keyword list and runs the full blog pipeline (quality gate + plagiarism stack + Originality.ai if Pro). The post publishes to your Shopify blog automatically.

Configuring rules

  1. Open /autopilot.
  2. Toggle each rule on/off — there's no "Add rule" form; rules ship with the app.
  3. Optional templates: scroll to Templates to override the AI's default phrasing per resource type (product / page / collection / article / image alt). Variables like {title} and {store_name} interpolate at run time.
  4. Set Daily scan time (default 02:00 UTC). The Autopilot worker fires once per day at this hour.
  5. Click Save in the SaveBar that appears after any change.

Safety & limits

  • Daily fix cap. Default 50 fixes/day per shop (max_fixes_per_day). Once hit, Autopilot stops for the day and resumes at the next scan.
  • AI wallet gate. Each fix that calls an AI model deducts from your wallet. Empty wallet = Autopilot pauses with a banner asking you to top up. See Auto-top-up.
  • Verification. Every Autopilot fix goes through verifyFix() — Shopify mutation → re-fetch → length-compare → mark verified / verification_failed / unverified in fix_queue. No optimistic completion (CLAUDE.md #17).
  • Master toggle. At the top of /autopilot, the master Enabled toggle pauses ALL rules instantly without losing config.

Cooldowns and special cases

  • Blog Auto-Publish runs at most every blog_frequency days (default 3). If you've published manually or via another path within that window, the rule skips the cycle.
  • IndexNow HEAD-probes https://<shop>/<key>.txt before submitting. If the key file is missing the activity-log entry shows status: skipped (not failed); the merchant needs to publish the key file before submission can succeed.
  • Image Compression only triggers on images > 2048px wide. Smaller images are skipped because re-encode rarely yields meaningful savings.

Activity log

Every Autopilot run appears in the Activity Log on the Autopilot page:

  • Timestamp
  • Rule type (alt_text, meta_descriptions, image_compression, etc.)
  • Items processed (5 alt texts written, 1 skipped (already had alt))
  • Verification status (5/5 verified)
  • Filter by rule + status; export to CSV.

When NOT to use Autopilot

  • During a brand voice transition — let manual edits land first, then re-enable.
  • On products with custom-written copy — set a tag and exclude that tag (when tag-filter ships).
  • If your AI wallet is consistently below $5 — Autopilot will keep stopping; better to budget per-week manually.

Removed rules (historical)

Two toggles documented in earlier versions of this article have been removed:

  • Broken redirect autopilot — the merchant-facing replacement is the Broken Links panel under Reports → Technical → Index, backed by RankEngine's live link checks.
  • Auto-redirect deleted products — querying deleted_products table that doesn't exist. Re-introduce requires a webhook + new migration; not currently planned.

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