How it works

What we read

StoreCanary reads your public product pages: the same server HTML, JSON-LD structured data, robots directives, and product feed signals that Google itself reads when it crawls your store. Nothing else. If it isn't visible to a normal visitor or to Google, we don't look at it.

What we never do

No Shopify app to install, no OAuth, no admin access, no password. No code is ever injected into your theme, and nothing on your store is ever modified. We cap our own crawl rate at a strict 2 requests per second so a scan never puts meaningful load on your store.

The ~40 checks

Every scan runs roughly 40 individual checks, grouped into five families:

• Structured data — Product schema validity, price and availability in the schema vs. reality on the page, review star markup.
• Indexability — noindex tags (meta and header-level), robots directives, canonical tags pointing where they should.
• Catalog health — 404s on previously indexed products, vanished or unpublished products, broken or unexpected redirects.
• International — hreflang correctness across markets and languages.
• Site-level — sitemap validity, domain/DNS basics, core performance signals.

How we avoid false alarms

An SEO monitor that cries wolf gets ignored, so we're conservative on purpose. An issue has to persist across two consecutive scans before we send an alert — a one-off blip during a deploy or a CDN hiccup won't trigger anything. Price checks account for EU and US formatting differences (commas, decimals, currency symbols) so we don't flag a formatting quirk as a mismatch. And cases that are often intentional — gift products, free samples, internal test SKUs — are flagged as "to confirm", not as failures, because only you know if they're supposed to be indexed.