Stealth mode

Stealth mode lets you run a live store that is not discoverable by search engines or AI engine crawlers. It is useful during soft launches, previews, or when you want a store reachable by direct URL but not indexed by Google, Bing, AI platforms such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, or other crawlers.

What stealth mode does

When stealth mode is active:

• robots.txt returns Disallow: / and removes the sitemap reference, instructing crawlers not to access any path on the site
• Sitemap — requests to /sitemap.xml return a 404 Not Found
• Merchant feeds — requests to /merchant-feed, /google-merchant-feed, and /facebook-merchant-feed return a 404 Not Found
• HTTP responses — every response includes an X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow header, instructing compliant search engines not to index the page or follow its links

Background jobs that generate sitemaps and merchant feeds also skip stores with stealth mode enabled, so no new files are produced.

What stealth mode does not do

Stealth mode suppresses exactly 4 entry points: robots.txt, sitemap, merchant feeds, and the X-Robots-Tag header. Everything else continues to function normally:

• RSS feeds — store and article RSS feeds remain accessible and are not suppressed
• API endpoints — the StoreConnect API is unaffected
• Data exports — any data export functionality continues to work normally
• Does not restrict access — any user with the URL can still visit and use the store normally. Stealth mode is not an authentication or IP restriction mechanism.
• Does not remove existing indexes — if the store was already indexed by search engines before stealth mode was enabled, those indexes remain until search engines re-crawl and respect the new directives.
• Does not apply per-page — stealth mode affects the entire store, not individual pages or sections.

Search engines, SEO, and AI engine crawlers

The User-agent: * directive in stealth mode’s robots.txt applies to all compliant crawlers — not just traditional search engines. This includes AI engine crawlers that index content for AI-powered search results and training datasets.

The X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow header sent on every response reinforces this signal for AI search engines that surface content in AI-generated results.

:::note robots.txt and the X-Robots-Tag header are voluntary standards. Compliant crawlers — including those from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity — respect these directives. Non-compliant scrapers may ignore them. Stealth mode signals intent to well-behaved crawlers; it does not block access. :::

Enable stealth mode

Stealth mode is controlled by a Store Variable. No code changes or deployment are required.

1. Open the Store record in Salesforce.
2. Go to the Store Variables related list and click New.
3. Set the Key to stealth_mode.
4. Set the Value to true (boolean — not the string "true").
5. Save the record.

Stealth mode takes effect immediately on the next request.

Disable stealth mode

Remove the stealth_mode Store Variable, or set its value to anything other than true. Normal behaviour resumes immediately.

Relationship to other settings

Stealth mode and test mode are independent. A store can have both active simultaneously — the combined effect is the same as stealth mode alone, since stealth mode is a superset of test mode’s crawling restrictions.

If you have defined a custom robots.txt content page, stealth mode overrides it. Stealth mode takes precedence and the custom page is bypassed.