Shopify FAQ and Policy Page Meta Description Missing or Blank
FAQ and informational pages created under Online Store > Pages keep their SEO title and meta description in the 'Search engine listing' section, stored as the same global.title_tag / global.description_tag metafields; policy pages (refund, privacy, terms, shipping) have even less native SEO control. When a page is re-imported, edited in bulk, or migrated to a new store, those fields are easily blanked and Shopify falls back to a generic title with no description. Shopify saves only the current value of a page's search listing — there is no revision history or undo — so once the meta is cleared the previous text is gone from the admin.
If you didn't already have a backup, those old values are gone — Shopify keeps no history.
The steps below recover what you can. To make the next time a 1-click undo instead of hours of CSV work: a daily snapshot of every SEO field. Free to monitor, no card — and SEO Vault only reads your store unless you click restore.
Find the trigger: open Online Store > Pages, click an affected FAQ or policy page, and check the 'Search engine listing' (Edit) section to confirm the title and description are blank; then review Settings > Apps and any recent Pages import to identify what overwrote them. Pause the offending app or sync.
Recover from a Pages backup: Pages are not in the standard product CSV, but Matrixify exports Pages with their 'Title Tag' and 'Description Tag' columns — open a pre-incident Matrixify export and copy the original meta values for each page.
No backup? Use the archive: open /pages/faq, /policies/refund-policy, and the other affected URLs in the Wayback Machine, copy the old <title> and meta description text from the saved source, re-enter it in each page's 'Edit website SEO' fields (or bulk re-import via Matrixify), then submit the URLs in Google Search Console URL Inspection.
Stop it recurring: the fix for any field with no native history is an external daily snapshot you can restore in one click. SEO Vault does this automatically for your product and collection SEO fields — meta titles, descriptions, alt text, tags, and handles — and alerts you (naming the likely app) when a bulk change clears them; keep a parallel Matrixify export of your Pages so your FAQ and policy snippets are covered by the same habit.
Source: Shopify Help Center — Edit search engine listings; Add a page to your online store; Store policies
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.