SEO & AI Guide

Overview

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps your marketplace appear in Google and other search engines. Good SEO brings organic traffic without paying for ads.

Prometora handles many SEO best practices automatically, but there are additional steps you can take to maximize your search visibility.

Built-in SEO Features

Your marketplace includes these SEO features automatically:

Accessing Your Sitemap & robots.txt

Both files are generated automatically and kept up to date - there is nothing to create or upload. On a custom domain they are served at the standard locations:

Your robots.txt allows all well-behaved crawlers - including the AI crawlers tracked in AI Visibility - to read your public pages, while keeping private pages like the cart, checkout, and dashboards out of search results. This is what the generated file looks like:

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /dashboard/
Disallow: /seller-dashboard/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /signin/
Disallow: /signup/
Disallow: /auth/
Disallow: /stripe-connect/
Disallow: /api/

Sitemap: https://www.yourmarketplace.com/sitemap.xml

Page SEO Settings

Customize SEO settings for each page in the Page Builder:

Page Title Best Practices

• Keep titles under 60 characters
• Include your primary keyword near the beginning
• Make it compelling to encourage clicks
• Each page should have a unique title

Meta Description Best Practices

• Keep descriptions between 150-160 characters
• Include your main keywords naturally
• Write a compelling summary that encourages clicks
• Include a call to action when appropriate

Listing SEO

Each listing automatically gets its own SEO-optimized page. Help your sellers create better listings:

Listing URLs

Every listing lives at a readable URL made from its title. The URL is generated automatically when the listing is created, and a short suffix (-2, -3) is only added when another listing in your marketplace already uses the same one.

Who can change it, and when

What this means for search engines

• The canonical tag and sitemap always use the readable URL, so search engines index one address per listing.
• Old links never break. Previous URLs (after an owner rename) and ID-based links both keep resolving and point search engines to the canonical version - no duplicate content, no lost rankings.
• Renaming does not reset rankings. The redirect from the old URL passes the signals along, but avoid renaming published listings without a reason.

Common questions

• Two sellers list "Wooden Bowl" - what happens? The first gets /listings/wooden-bowl, the second /listings/wooden-bowl-2. Sellers can make theirs more specific in the Listing URL field while it is a draft.
• A seller published with a typo in the URL. Open the listing from Store Settings and change it yourself; the misspelled URL redirects to the corrected one.
• Do older listings keep their URL? Yes. Nothing changes for listings that already exist unless you rename them.

Custom Domain for SEO

Using a custom domain significantly improves your SEO:

See our Custom Domain documentation to set up your own domain.

Content Strategy

Create additional content to attract organic traffic:

Technical SEO Checklist

SEO & AI Settings Tab

The SEO & AI tab in your Store Settings dashboard gives you a central place to manage how your marketplace appears in search engines, in AI assistants, and on social media.

AI Visibility: Which AI Crawlers Read Your Marketplace

AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can only recommend products they have read. Their crawlers visit marketplaces the same way Google's does - but normal analytics tools can't see them, because crawlers don't run the JavaScript those tools depend on. Prometora counts these visits at the server, where they are visible, and shows you the result in the AI Visibility section of the SEO & AI tab.

Curious what these crawlers actually do? We logged every AI crawler visit across 13 real marketplaces for a week and published the findings: What AI Crawlers Actually Read - 7 days of data.

The most reliable way to get unread listings read is activity: new listings, updated listings, and clear internal links keep crawlers coming deeper into your catalog. Good titles and full descriptions matter too - they might help a listing get picked up, and they're what makes it quotable once read (see the Listing SEO section above). Crawlers return on their own schedule, so expect changes to show up over days and weeks, not hours.

Google Ads Conversion Tracking

Paste a Google Ads conversion ID (and optionally a conversion label) into Store Settings and Prometora will fire named conversion events on the moments you want to optimize for - signups, checkouts, purchases, trial starts. That makes paid campaigns measurable and lets Google's smart bidding optimize for the events that actually matter.

How to set it up

1. In Google Ads, create a conversion action and grab the Conversion ID (looks like AW-123456789) and the Conversion label.
2. In Prometora, open Store Settings → General and paste both into the Google Ads section.
3. Pick which named event (purchase, sign_up, etc.) you want to use as the conversion action in Google Ads.
4. Send paid traffic to your store and confirm the conversion fires in the Google Ads dashboard.

Measuring SEO Success

Track your SEO progress with these tools:

• Google Search Console: See how your site appears in search results
• Google Analytics: Track organic traffic and user behavior
• Your dashboard: Monitor traffic and sales trends

Getting Started with Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that shows how Google sees your marketplace. Here's how to set it up and submit your sitemap:

Step 1: Add Your Property

Step 2: Verify Ownership

Google needs to verify you own the site. The easiest method for Prometora marketplaces:

Step 3: Submit Your Sitemap

Your sitemap tells Google about all the pages on your marketplace:

After submitting, Google will start crawling your pages. Check back in a few days to see your search performance data, including impressions, clicks, and average position.