Brand archetypes

Every audited site is classified into one of four archetypes. The archetype decides which structured-data signals the site is expected to have, and which shopper questions it gets asked — so it is one of the highest-leverage decisions in a run.

Archetype	What it means
ecommerce	Sells products directly, with a cart
saas	Sells software
service	Sells services or engagements
unknown	Could not be determined from evidence

Two rules about how it is inferred

Only positive evidence counts. The archetype is inferred from markers actually found in the crawl — never from the absence of something.

The caller's category is never used. At the MCP boundary, category is caller-supplied and therefore attacker-controllable. A brand that could nominate its own archetype could nominate the one with the checks it happens to pass, which would make the score self-graded.

Inference rules, first match wins

1. SoftwareApplication / WebApplication JSON-LD → saas
2. Product / ProductGroup JSON-LD → ecommerce
3. Any strong commerce marker → ecommerce
4. Organization and (Service or FAQ), with zero commerce markers → service
5. Organization and (Service or FAQ), but weak commerce markers present → unknown
6. Weak markers only, no service markup → ecommerce
7. Otherwise → unknown

Strong vs weak commerce markers

Strong — a commerce platform fingerprint, cart markup, or a genuinely transactional URL (/cart, /checkout, /basket).

Weak — a catalog-shaped URL (/products, /collections, /shop, /dp).

The distinction matters because a services firm frequently has a /products page describing its offerings without selling anything. Treating that as a storefront would hand it the ecommerce check set and penalize it for missing product schema on things it does not sell.

Platform fingerprints match loaded infrastructure — Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Squarespace Commerce — not brand-name substrings in page text.

Why unknown is scored as ecommerce

unknown maps to the ecommerce check set. That is the pre-archetype default, so a site that cannot be classified is measured exactly as every site was measured before archetypes existed. It keeps historical scores meaningful rather than introducing a fourth, lenient scoring path that a site could fall into by being illegible.

Stability caveat

An archetype flip between ecommerce and service swaps all four signal checks and can move the total by up to 40 points. Archetype stability across runs has not been measured over a large sample — see Measurement reliability.