For your business · Ecommerce

Article 50 for Ecommerce Stores

Last updated: 8 November 2026

Article 50 for ecommerce depends on AI features, not on selling online. An AI shopping assistant must be disclosed as AI unless that is obvious, and photorealistic AI product images that shoppers would take as real photos may need a disclosure. The free Article50.io scan loads one public page in a real browser and shows the most severe finding.

Your own AI generation features can bring you in too, not only an assistant or product imagery. The most common gap is an AI assistant posing as a person. Here's how to tell which apply to your store.

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Does Article 50 apply to you?

It's likely relevant if you…

✔Run an AI chat or shopping assistant that talks to customers
✔Use realistic AI-generated product photos, lifestyle shots or AI models
✔Offer customers an AI feature that generates images or text (virtual try-on, design tools)
✔Use AI-generated product descriptions — usually low exposure, see below

It's probably not relevant if…

—Your store has no AI chat and publishes no AI-generated media
—AI product descriptions only: ordinary product copy generally isn't "public-interest" text under Article 50(4), and marking it is the generation tool's job under 50(2)
—Your AI imagery is clearly illustrative or stylised and wouldn't pass as a real photo

Not sure which situation you're in? Start from does Article 50 apply to you?

Which parts of Article 50 apply, and why

Art. 50(1) — AI shopping assistants

Customers chatting with an AI assistant must be told it's an AI unless that's obvious. The duty is the provider's — usually your chat vendor — but the undisclosed AI is on your store, so add the notice yourself.

Art. 50(2) — AI-generated images and text

The tools that generate your images and descriptions must mark their output machine-readably; if you built the generator (for example a try-on feature), that's you. Keep the marking intact through your image pipeline and CDN.

Art. 50(4) — realistic product imagery

A deep fake can resemble objects, places or events as well as people (Art. 3(60)). A photorealistic AI image that shoppers would take as a real photo of a real product may need a disclosure — a point worth checking rather than assuming.

The most common gap: an AI assistant posing as a person

The pattern we see most in stores is a chat assistant with a human name — "Hi, I'm Sophie, how can I help?" — running on AI with no notice that it's automated. That's squarely an Article 50(1) gap, and the easiest one to fix.

Close behind: photorealistic AI lifestyle images or AI models presented as ordinary photography. Label those with a caption or badge — see the AI image & video disclosure template.

What the free scan checks

The free scan loads your store's public pages and flags AI chat widgets without a disclosure, and AI-generated content markers (generator metadata, AI-generated attributes) without a visible label. It can't tell that an image is AI-generated when the page carries no marker for it.

Check your site automatically

Article50.io is an automated scanner for the Article 50 transparency rules of the EU AI Act. It scans a website for potential Article 50 transparency gaps and generates a report of what the scan found and what it could not check, with remediation guidance, implementation instructions and disclosure wording you can paste in.

The free scan shows your single most severe finding. Scans are capped at 45 seconds — no signup, public pages only.