A scan of 59 Chinese cross-border brand websites found that none block OAI-SearchBot, 67.4% serve an llms.txt file, and only 1.9% carry FAQPage schema.
But when we opened the llms.txt files, four out of five contained no brand information — they were Shopify platform templates about payment protocols.
The door is open, but the room is empty.
Raw data and the scanning script are included below.
The first article in this series scanned 100 AI tool websites and found something counterintuitive: almost nobody blocks AI search crawlers, but the industry is checking the wrong one.
That scan explicitly noted a limit: "Whether the same holds for a DTC brand or a manufacturing exporter is a separate question this sample cannot answer." This article answers that question.
Instead of AI companies, we scanned 59 Chinese-origin brands that sell internationally through their own websites — from Anker and SHEIN to mid-tier outdoor gear and e-bike makers.
These are the brands that would benefit most from showing up when someone asks ChatGPT "what's a good portable power station for camping?" The results did not match what I expected, and the real finding was not in any of the metrics I planned to check.
The sample 59 Chinese cross-border brand domains across 18 product categories: consumer electronics, smart home, portable power, DTC fashion, beauty, outdoor gear, LED displays, 3D printers, digital tablets, e-bikes, projectors, smart pet devices, audio, rugged phones, and wearables.
About a third are well-known names: Anker, SHEIN, Roborock, EcoFlow, Govee.
The rest are mid-tier brands — Tribit, Blackdeer, Oukitel, Fiido, Engwe — the kind that would benefit most from AI visibility but are unlikely to have a dedicated AI-SEO person.
Of the 59, 53 returned their homepage (HTTP 200). 2 returned 403, and 4 failed to connect (DNS timeout or abort).
Every metric below uses only the sites where that specific signal was conclusively readable — not 59, not 53, but the per-metric denominator noted in each table.
The same scanning script as the first article: zero LLM calls, failures recorded as errors, no defaults masquerading as data.
Finding 1: Nobody blocks AI search crawlers here either Crawler AI tools (n=68) Export brands (n=47) OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search) 0% 0% ChatGPT-User (live fetch) 0% 0% GPTBot (training) 5.9% 2.1% ClaudeBot 5.9% 2.1% PerplexityBot 1.5% 0% Google-Extended 5.9% 2.1% CCBot 7.4% 2.1% Bytespider 5.9% 2.1% The blocking rate is even lower than AI companies.
Only one brand — Elegoo, a 3D printer maker — blocks GPTBot, and it leaves OAI-SearchBot open.
That is the same deliberate, informed pattern from the first scan: opt out of training data, stay in the search index.
For anyone still worried about "accidental crawler blocking" as a major risk: in a combined sample of 159 sites across two very different populations, zero block OAI-SearchBot.
Zero block ChatGPT-User.
The door is open.
The question, then, is what is behind that door.
Finding 2: 67% serve llms.txt.
Most of them are empty.
Of the 43 sites where the llms.txt check was conclusive, 29 served a file — 67.4%.
That is nearly double the 38.8% found in AI-native tools.
My initial reaction was that Chinese export brands were somehow ahead.
The data looked clean.
The file existed.
The scanner confirmed it was not an HTML error page.
Then I read the files.
I pulled the actual llms.txt content from five brands: Anker, Florasis, Tribit, Blackdeer, and Oukitel.
Four of the five contained identical text: References to "Shop skill" and the "UCP protocol" A endpoint for payment handling Instructions about "unauthorized purchases" Zero product names.
Zero brand positioning.
Zero information an AI model could use to answer "what does this brand sell?" These are Shopify platform templates.
The file exists at because Shopify puts it there, not because someone at the brand wrote it.
The one exception was Anker.
Its llms.txt described the brand's positioning, listed eight product categor