flareOps

Description

flareOps connects your WooCommerce store to the flareOps service, which checks your catalog the way AI shopping and search engines read it, finds the gaps, and suggests fixes. Nothing changes in your store unless you approve it, and every change can be undone. flareOps never invents a GTIN, price or stock status.

What the plugin does in your store:

• Approved product fixes with undo: brand, GTIN (validated, never guessed), MPN, title, short description, and description / FAQ text. Every change is logged with who approved it, and can be undone from the flareOps page.
• Google Merchant Center feed at /flareops-feed/google.xml, following Google’s product data specification.
• IndexNow: tells participating search engines (such as Bing) when a product page changes, so it is re-crawled quickly.
• Visible product facts and structured data: a short stock line and your own shipping and returns text on product pages, and brand, GTIN and MPN added to WooCommerce’s existing product JSON-LD.
• Site verification tags so you can verify the site in your own Google or Bing account (Merchant Center, Search Console), and, only if you allow it on the Connect screen, so flareOps can verify it for its Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools accounts.
• Measurement: visits from AI crawlers and assistants (such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot) and visits and orders referred by AI apps (such as ChatGPT or Perplexity), counted in your own database. The referral counter uses no cookies and stores no IP address.

The flareOps service (app.flareops.ai) shows the audit, suggestions to approve, and reports. The plugin is the interface between your store and that service; the service itself is described at https://flareops.ai/.

Free and paid plans

The plugin is free. It needs a flareOps account, which has a Free plan (the store check: score, what AI can read, what to fix) and a paid Pro plan (suggestions and approved fixes, the weekly AI check, Merchant Center sync). Prices: https://flareops.ai/#pricing. Plans are bought and managed on app.flareops.ai, never inside WordPress; the plugin handles no payments. Without a paid plan, the plugin keeps working with the Free plan’s features.

Connect

Go to WooCommerce → flareOps and click Connect to flareOps. You sign in on app.flareops.ai and approve the connection there, including the data use described below. The plugin then stores a store key (kept out of autoloaded options and never shown). Disconnect removes the key on both sides, removes the verification tags and stops all data sharing.

Before you connect, the plugin sends nothing to any outside service.

External services

This plugin connects to outside services only after the store admin connects the store to flareOps and approves data use on app.flareops.ai. Data sharing can be switched off on the flareOps page, and Disconnect stops it entirely.

flareOps app (app.flareops.ai), operated by flareOps.

• What: when you click “Connect to flareOps”, your browser is sent to app.flareops.ai with your site address, the admin page address to return to, the plugin version and a one-time challenge.
• When: only when you click Connect.

flareOps API (api.flareops.ai), operated by flareOps.

• Connect: the plugin sends the one-time code, a one-time verifier and your site address, and receives the store key and settings (site verification codes and the IndexNow key). Once, at the end of Connect.
• Product change notices: product IDs, the type of change (created, updated, deleted, stock) and the time. Batched, at most once a minute, in the background. No product content, customer or order data.
• Disconnect: a request to revoke the store key.
• The flareOps service also reads data from your store through the plugin’s REST API, authenticated with the store key: the product catalog, the flareOps change log, AI-crawler visit counts and recent crawler visits (including the crawler’s IP address, kept at most 7 days before it is shortened), AI-referral counts, and AI-attributed orders (a hashed order reference, date, total, currency and referral source; no names, emails or addresses). It can also save settings you approved (such as verification codes and feature switches) and product fixes you approved. It never sends code to run.
• Terms of service: https://flareops.ai/terms
• Privacy policy: https://flareops.ai/privacy

IndexNow (api.indexnow.org), a protocol run jointly by participating search engines.

• What: the addresses (URLs) of product pages that changed, your site’s host name, and the IndexNow key (which is also public at /{key}.txt on your site).
• When: after a product is saved, batched and sent in the background at most once a minute, only while connected and with data sharing on. It can be switched off on the flareOps page.
• About the service and its documentation: https://www.indexnow.org/ and https://www.indexnow.org/documentation

Google and Bing site verification. The plugin prints verification meta tags in your page head; it does not contact Google or Bing itself. Only if you allow “search engine access” on the Connect screen, the flareOps service uses them to verify your site in its own Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools accounts (which makes flareOps a verified owner there, used to read search data and submit your sitemap). You can withdraw this in the flareOps dashboard; disconnecting removes the tags and flareOps’ verification.

• Data processing agreement: https://flareops.ai/dpa
• Sub-processors: https://flareops.ai/subprocessors

Privacy

• AI-referral counting uses no cookies, stores nothing in the visitor’s browser and stores no IP address or visitor ID, only daily counts per source and landing page. If your site uses a consent plugin that supports the WP Consent API, the counter runs only after the visitor allows “statistics”. Developers can switch it off with the flareops_beacon_enabled filter.
• Suggested text for your privacy policy is added to Settings → Privacy → Policy Guide.
• AI-crawler logging stores the crawler’s IP address for at most 7 days (then shortened to /24 for IPv4 and /48 for IPv6), and deletes raw rows after 30 days.
• Order references sent to the flareOps service are salted hashes, never order numbers.