How to Audit Your Shopify SEO After Installing a New App
Most apps ask for write access to your products, content, or theme the moment you install them, and plenty of them quietly rewrite meta titles, alt text, URL handles, or structured data to "help" your SEO. The catch is that Shopify keeps no history of those fields, so if an app overwrote something that was already working, you won't notice until rankings slip weeks later. Here's how to check exactly what the app touched before you trust it.
Step by step
Check what the app is actually allowed to change. Go to Settings > Apps and sales channels, click the app you just installed, and open its data access (permissions). If you see write access to products, content (blog posts and pages), or your online store theme, the app can edit SEO fields. Write down the install date too. Anything that changed around that date is a suspect.
Pull a full snapshot of your current SEO fields. Run a free crawler like Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs) across your storefront and export every page's title tag, meta description, H1, canonical URL, and image alt text into a spreadsheet. This is your 'right after install' baseline. If you have an older crawl or export to compare against, look for fields that suddenly went blank, got templated into a generic pattern, or had their wording swapped.
Spot-check the pages that earn you traffic, plus your structured data. Open your top products, collections, and blog posts in admin and read the 'Search engine listing' preview. Confirm the meta title, description, and URL handle are still what you wrote. Then run a couple of those URLs through Google's Rich Results Test to make sure your product and article schema is valid and the app didn't inject duplicate or broken JSON-LD. Pay close attention to changed URL handles: a new handle with no redirect turns a ranking page into a 404.
Set up a way to catch silent changes from here on. Shopify doesn't log edits to SEO fields, so a one-time audit only tells you about today. Re-crawl on a schedule and watch Google Search Console's Pages report for sudden indexing drops. If you'd rather not babysit it by hand, SEO Vault snapshots your meta titles, descriptions, alt text, tags, handles, and structured data every day, alerts you when a batch of fields changes at once (and names the app that most likely caused it), and lets you roll any field back to its previous value in one click.
Source: Shopify Help Center, search engine optimization documentation (help.shopify.com) and Google Search Console Help, Page indexing report
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.