Does a ceramic coating fix stone chips?
Quick answer: No. A stone chip is paint that has been knocked off the car, and a ceramic coating is a clear film a few microns thick. It cannot put back what is missing. Chips get dealt with first, by touch-in or by a localised paint repair, and the coating then protects the paint that is actually there.
This is the question underneath a lot of coating enquiries, and it is usually asked hopefully. A coating is sold on hardness, so it sounds like the sort of thing that ought to fill a chip in. It does not, and understanding why saves you spending money in the wrong order.
A chip is physical loss. Something hit the panel hard enough to take the lacquer off, usually the colour with it, and often down to primer or bare metal. A ceramic coating cures to a clear layer thinner than a human hair. Poured into a crater, it does not level it or hide it; it follows the shape of whatever is underneath. Coat a chipped bonnet and you get a chipped bonnet that is easier to wash.
What actually deals with a stone chip
There are three honest routes, and which one applies depends on the size of the damage rather than on your budget.
For the ordinary motorway peppering across a bonnet, the answer is a touch-in: colour-matched paint put into each chip with an artist's brush. It is worth being straight about what that achieves. It seals bare metal so the chip cannot start rusting from the middle out, and it makes the panel look considerably better, especially on dark colours where every chip reads as a white dot. It is not an invisible repair, and the chip is still physically there. We run it alongside another booking rather than as a visit of its own.
Where a chip is large, or a cluster has taken a chunk out of one area, a localised SMART repair is the route that actually removes the damage rather than filling it, because the area is prepared, painted and blended into the surrounding panel. A bonnet that has been sandblasted by years of motorway miles is the one case where a full panel respray is the sensible answer, and any workshop that tells you otherwise is selling you a touch-in.
Do the repairs first, then the coating
The order is not a preference, it is the whole point. A coating is designed to stay put for years, so anything you seal underneath it stays sealed under it. Chips, swirls and dull paint all get locked in exactly as they are on the day it goes on.
That is why the preparation before a coating is most of the work, and why basic chip attention is part of it rather than an upsell. If the paint is going to be corrected and protected for the next few years, it makes no sense to leave bare metal exposed under a film that is meant to be keeping water off it.
What if the chips appear after the coating
They will, eventually, because a coating does not stop stone impacts. Touch-in paint still works on a coated panel: there is enough for it to key to, and it goes on exactly as it would on bare lacquer. There is more detail on that in can I touch up over a ceramic coating?
Whether the repaired area needs re-coating afterwards is a smaller question than it sounds. For a handful of brush touch-ins, usually not. If the repair involved sanding and polishing the area back, the finish there can end up visibly different from the rest of the panel, and that is worth putting right while the car is with someone.
For the other half of this question, which is how much a coating helps before the damage happens, see does a ceramic coating protect against stone chips?