Measured 17 and 18 October 2026

Four shop windows, one question. Three of them answered nothing.

Somebody asks an assistant for a maker or a practice like yours, and it goes to the place your work actually lives. We put that one request to four shop windows — an Etsy shop page, an Instagram profile, a Pinterest profile, and one business’s own page — with one ordinary web request each, except Pinterest, which refuses us in writing, so we read the refusal rather than send the request. We counted what came back readable. Three returned nothing a machine could use: 0 characters, 9 characters, and a refusal written down before a single byte was sent. The fourth returned 9,818 characters and answered 29 of the 90 questions a buyer asks — which is the only one of the four where the business had anything to gain by trying harder.

Your own shop looks fine to you, because you are looking at it with eyes. The thing that decides whether you get recommended is not looking at it with eyes. That gap is the whole of what this page is about, and every figure on it was measured before the page existed, so you can re-run it.

The four windows, side by side

The dental practice in rows two and four is one business, scanned twice in the same minute: its own page, then its Instagram. 9,818 characters against 9. It did nothing wrong on Instagram. It is standing somewhere that hands a machine a door instead of a room.

This is not a page about careless platforms

Each of the three has a reason, and in two cases the reason is care rather than neglect. Reading them properly is the only way the comparison is worth anything.

Etsy has thought about this harder than most. It publishes a document written specifically for AI assistants, and that document tells them never to state a price, a stock level or a shipping time from memory — read it off the live page instead, because a stale price harms the buyer and the seller both. That is the right rule. Its robots file permits a shop page and a listing page outright: read by group rather than as one wall, the section that applies to everybody carries no rule touching a shop address. The rule depends entirely on the live page answering, and the live page served 776 bytes of challenge to every address we tried.

One thing in that file is worth knowing before you test it yourself. Etsy’s keyword pages are built from whatever words are in the address, which its own guidance says is why an assistant can safely make one up for any request — so a keyword page that comes back full of results is not evidence that anybody stocks that thing. A populated page proves nothing. The same file also closes its keyword search addresses to crawlers — the plain one and 29 further regional paths, 30 rules in all, in the section that applies to us.

Pinterest refuses in writing, and publishes the form. Its instructions to machines run to 1,152 lines, and they list readers one at a time. We counted the entries ourselves rather than quoting the count: 314, of which 313 name a particular reader and the last is a catch-all that turns away everybody else. 293 of the named ones sit inside the single block that is let in. The first line of that file is a link to the form you fill in to be added. The eleven most-used assistants are not refused by name; they are simply not on the list yet, which is a door rather than a wall.

Instagram’s answer is the shortest. Its own instructions to machines say no, to everyone, in two lines, and what a machine receives at a profile address is the sign-in page. Even the fuller version of that page a real browser gets — which we reconstructed from bytes already on disk rather than asking Instagram for anything — carries no link to a single post: 657 posts declared, none of them reachable as an address. The only durable facts the profile publishes about itself are counts of its own posts.

And one platform where the audit simply passes

Which is the honest shape of the whole market. The platforms have mostly solved the product. Nobody has published the service — your real lead time this month, what you will and will not take on, what a commission involves, what happens if it has to be remade. No marketplace holds those answers. You do.

The one route that reaches a platform that refuses

Pinterest will not read its own pages out to a machine, but a Pin can carry a price — and it gets that price by reading your page. Its rules are specific: mark the page up as a product, and one of the required fields is the price itself. Publish it properly on a surface you own and it travels into Pinterest on its own. A Pin with no price is almost never Pinterest holding it back; it is the page it read never stating it in a form it could lift.

We measured that on a real florist’s own site. Two wedding packages sit on one page. Both state their price in prose, where a person can read it. One carries the markup and the other does not, so one of them can appear on Pinterest with its price attached and the other cannot. Across every page we read, the Open Graph price field appears zero times. Nothing anywhere tells the owner which package is which, and the fix is not more work — it is the same words, written where a machine can lift them.

How we know the instruments could look

A tool that reports a thing absent when it could not look is worse than no tool, so every reading above sits beside a control, in both directions.

• Something that had to succeed. The same scanner, in the same minute, read the practice’s own site: 15 pages, 9,818 readable characters, 29 of 90. On the Pinterest run, a florist’s own site came back at 10 pages and 10,067 characters. The instrument was working when it returned 9.
• Something that had to fail differently. A hostname that does not exist came back unreachable, with 0 pages and 0 characters — a different shape from the profile’s 9 characters across 1 page. A refusal and a dead host are not being confused.
• Two pages that must differ, coming back identical. A real Etsy shop, a category page and a shop name that cannot exist returned the same refusal once the per-request token was removed; the Instagram profile and Instagram’s own front door returned the same 9 characters and the same title. The only difference was the address we had asked for, echoed back. That is how you know you were looking at the door and never at the room.
• A count that had to come back non-zero. Searching Pinterest’s file for the assistants your customers use returns nothing — so we searched it for readers we knew were in it, and found them. The zero is a zero, not a blind read.

We did not try to get past a challenge page or a bot filter anywhere, and we will not. Recording a closed door is the measurement. Picking the lock is a different thing and not one we do.

What the upgrade actually is

1. Somebody asked an assistant for a business like yours last week, and one name came back. It was not yours. Not because your work is worse — because at the address they went to, there were 9 characters.
2. You can be the one it names, and the facts are already yours. It is called agentification, which means getting the plain facts of your business — what you make, what you will take on, what it costs, how long it takes right now — into a form the assistants your customers ask can actually read.
3. You ought to do it now, because the first answer takes an evening. Twelve answers about your own business, in your own words, in the order a customer meets them.

The store stays yours. Gala for your Etsy store, Gala for your Instagram store, Gala for your Pinterest — nothing is replaced, nothing is migrated, nothing is redesigned. What you get is your Gala stage: nine canvases a visitor and an assistant both arrive at, built on your twelve answers rather than on a template, with the facts in the page itself so the two readers cannot be told different things. Behind it is your Gala backstage, where you answer, change your mind, and answer again.

And your stage will show the gaps. If there is no way to book you, it says so, because a page that quietly leaves a question out is working for the business against the person trying to buy — and that is exactly why an assistant can trust the ones that answer.

Run the same test on your own window

Do not take the four rows above on trust; the only numbers that matter are yours. The scan runs from outside, against any web address, and it reports what it could not read as well as what it could — it withholds a score rather than inventing one when nothing came back.

Run the free scan

It takes about a minute and asks for nothing but a web address. When you want to know what a Gala asks of you, that is twelve answers, not a fee.

The same measurement, one window at a time

• Gala for your Etsy store — the 776 bytes, four addresses, and what a maker’s own site was missing.
• Gala for your Instagram store — the sign-in wall, read with four controls beside it.
• Gala for Pinterest — the allowlist, the three Pin shapes, and the price field.
• Gala for your Google Business Profile — the one surface that answers, and what it will not carry.