SearchPie overwrote your meta descriptions? How to get the originals back
SearchPie's bulk meta optimizer includes an "overwrite edited content" option. When that's left on during a bulk run or auto-optimize, it quietly replaces the meta descriptions you wrote by hand with its own templated version. Shopify keeps no version history for these fields, so there's no native undo button — to get the originals back you have to rebuild from a copy made before the change.
Step by step
Stop SearchPie from re-applying it first. Open SearchPie in your Shopify admin, go to its meta tag / bulk optimization settings, and turn OFF auto-optimize plus the 'overwrite edited content' toggle (sometimes labeled 'apply to products that already have a meta description'). If you skip this, anything you fix can get wiped again on the next bulk run or sync — this isn't malicious, it's just how autopilot bulk tools behave when overwrite is enabled.
Map how much was hit. Spot-check a few items in Shopify admin: open a product, scroll to 'Search engine listing', and click Edit to read the current meta description. If they all follow the same pattern (e.g. 'Buy [Product] at [Store] - Free Shipping'), it was a bulk overwrite. Check collections too, not just products, since SearchPie can run on both. If SearchPie shows a job history or activity log, note the date it ran — that's your cutoff for what needs recovering.
Recover the original text from a pre-change copy. Shopify doesn't version meta descriptions, so pull them from a backup, in order of reliability: (a) an older product CSV export — Shopify's product CSV has an 'SEO Description' column, so you can copy or re-import from a pre-change export; (b) the Wayback Machine — open an archived snapshot of a product page from before the run, view page source, and find the <meta name="description"> tag; (c) Google's live search snippet, which sometimes still shows the old wording. Collections aren't in the product CSV, so you'll likely rebuild those from Wayback or by hand.
Put the originals back (CSV import for products, manual edits for collections) and set up a safety net so a bulk run never costs you a day again. A daily SEO snapshot — like SEO Vault — saves every product and collection's meta title, description, alt text, tags, and handles each day, flags when a batch of them changes at once and points at the app that likely did it, and lets you restore the previous version in one click. With that running, the next SearchPie overwrite is a quick diff and a click instead of a recovery project.
Source: Shopify Help Center — "Edit a product's search engine listing" (documentation on setting meta titles and descriptions in Shopify admin; note that Shopify does not store version history for these fields)
SEO Vault keeps a daily snapshot of every SEO field on your store — meta titles, descriptions, alt-text, tags, handles (products AND collections) — and emails you the moment something changes in bulk, with the likely app responsible. One click restores yesterday's state, just the SEO fields. Free to monitor and get alerted; $14/mo for 1-click restore.