Give each product one address agents can follow

A Shopify product can be reached at many addresses, such as through each collection it's in. The canonical tag tells agents which one is the real one, and links in your collection pages' HTML let them find products at all.

Check D5 in the Discovery dimension, worth 2 points of 100 and measured by software.

What we check

Two halves, averaged. First, the share of sampled product pages whose canonical tag points to the product's own URL. Second, the share of sampled collection pages that link to 4 or more products in their raw HTML, before any script runs.

Why it matters

Without clean canonical URLs and crawlable links, agents index duplicates or miss products.

Products that only appear after a script runs, as with some infinite scroll and filter apps, may never be found by agents that read HTML.

How to fix it

Fix canonical tags in the product template and render collection product links in HTML. Typical effort: 1 hour.

  1. Shopify themes print the canonical tag with {{ canonical_url }} in theme.liquid, which points a product reached through a collection to its own /products/ address. If yours points elsewhere, restore that tag.
  2. Make sure collection pages render their product grid in the HTML. If a filtering or infinite scroll app loads products only in the browser, ask its developer for a first page rendered on the server.

Check it yourself

View the source of a product page and search for rel="canonical". Its address should be the product's own /products/ URL. Then view the source of a collection page and check that links to products appear in it.

See how your store does

The free audit runs this check and the rest on your store and emails you your score, your grade and your top findings, with the evidence for each.