Mixed signal. Discovery holds up, but content falls short.

Aesop scores 50/98 because the storefront is legible to crawlers but hostile to agents actually trying to transact. Product data is textbook Shopify JSON-LD, yet the root domain returns 403 on cart, checkout, sitemap, and policy pages, so any agent that gets past discovery immediately hits a wall. The result is a store that indexes beautifully and converts nothing.

Where the points went

The evidence

• Checkout flow structure, 0/6: https://aesop.com/cart and https://aesop.com/checkout both return 403, and the same block hits /terms, /privacy, /about, and the root itself. Seven of thirty scanner fetches were forbidden, a 23% block rate concentrated on exactly the pages agents need.
• Merchant verifiability, 0/3: The classifier could not extract a business name, address, or registration. The only quote it could pull was "Just a moment... Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue", meaning the trust page is gated behind an interstitial.
• Sitemap quality, 0/4: https://aesop.com/sitemap.xml returns 403. Robots.txt does declare https://www.aesop.com/sitemap_index.xml, so the sitemap exists, but the canonical path an agent tries first is blocked.
• Decision-support metadata, 0/3: Zero high-signal hits across nine products. Only the Aposē lamp surfaces useful decision context (regional pre-order windows); everything else offers ingredients without skin-type, use-case, or comparison guidance.
• Return policy, 0/3: No /returns page reachable, no returns link from the homepage. An agent asked "can I return this?" has nothing to cite.

What already works

• AI crawler posture, 6/6: All eight tracked agents (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Amazonbot, others) are explicitly allowed.
• Structured product data, 6/6 and Price in raw HTML, 8/8: All nine sampled products carry Product plus Offer JSON-LD with prices in the raw response.
• Cart API accessibility, 3/3: Shopify /cart/add form POST is exposed and documented in markup.

Fix first

1. Stop 403-ing /cart, /checkout, /sitemap.xml, and policy pages for non-browser user agents. Recovers up to 14 points.
2. Publish a machine-readable returns policy linked from the homepage and add verifiable merchant identity to the footer. Recovers 6 points.
3. Add priceValidUntil, shipping details in Offer, and skin-type or use-case metadata to product JSON-LD. Recovers 5 points.

The biggest opportunity is unblocking the transaction surface: Aesop has done the schema work, then locked the door.