Smart SEO by Sherpas overwrote my meta descriptions on Shopify — how to recover them
Smart SEO by Sherpas Design can generate and apply meta titles and descriptions in bulk across your whole catalog — including AI-written descriptions — and running that replaces whatever was already in those fields with its own generated version, often on hundreds of products and collections in a single pass. Those are real Shopify SEO metafields with no version history, so there's no native undo and no record of what your descriptions said before, which is how one bulk run can quietly flatten descriptions you wrote by hand.
Step by step
Stop Smart SEO's bulk meta generation first. In the app, open the Meta Tags settings and turn off the automatic/AI meta description rule and any saved template — otherwise it re-applies its generated version on the next run (including scheduled re-optimization) and overwrites your fix. Check whether it touched collection descriptions too, not just products, since the bulk apply usually spans both.
Recover your originals from any copy you still have: re-import the meta description column from a pre-change CSV export (Matrixify maps it to the global.description_tag metafield), or copy the old descriptions Google is still showing in live search results — search snippets lag a recrawl by a few days, so grab them before they update.
Where nothing survives, rewrite the pages that matter first: in Google Search Console > Pages, find the products and collections actually earning clicks, write a unique description for each of those, then request re-indexing of just those URLs so Google recrawls the corrected meta.
Going forward, keep a daily snapshot of every meta description (products and collections) so a single bulk run is flagged the day it happens — with the app that changed them named — and yesterday's descriptions restore in one click instead of a manual rebuild.
Source: Smart SEO app listing (Meta Tags / AI meta description feature, by Sherpas Design); Shopify Help Center: editing search engine listings
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.