Product Data Check: Audit Your Shopify Store for Gaps in 10 Minutes

You can check a Shopify store for product data gaps in about ten minutes with three steps. First, run a free visibility check from the outside that shows, without installing anything, how Google Shopping and AI assistants see your products. Then export your products as CSV and check seven columns for empty or duplicate values. Finally, look at product issues in Google Merchant Center. Afterwards you know which gaps to close first.

Why product data decides visibility

Google Shopping only shows products whose data is complete and understandable. Missing GTIN, unclear category, or missing age group and gender on apparel, and a product is limited or not shown at all. AI assistants like ChatGPT work similarly: they can only recommend a product if title, description and structured data tell them what it is and who it's for.

The tricky part: your own store looks fine. Images, price, add-to-cart button, all there. The gaps are in fields shoppers never see.

Step 1: Free visibility check (2 minutes)

Start with the outside view. Heartly's free visibility check needs no installation and no admin access:

1. Open heartly.io/ucp-visibility-test.
2. Enter your store address.
3. You get an assessment of how readable your products are for Google Shopping and AI assistants, and which information is missing.

The check doesn't replace looking at your data, but it quickly shows whether there's a problem and where to look. Note the most striking points.

Step 2: Check the CSV export (5 minutes)

1. In Shopify admin, go to Products and click Export.
2. Choose all products and the CSV format for spreadsheets.
3. Open the file in Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice or Google Sheets.
4. Filter to active products (Status = active) so drafts and archived items don't skew the numbers.
5. Go through the columns in the table below. Use the "empty" filter to count missing values.

Export column	What to check	Why it matters
Variant Barcode	Empty? Digits only, 8, 12, 13 or 14 long?	The GTIN is one of Google's most important identifiers. Invalid values are worse than none.
Variant SKU	Empty or duplicated?	Unique identifier per variant for inventory, feeds and reports.
Body (HTML)	Empty or just a sentence or two?	Without a description, Google and AI assistants lack the basis to understand the product.
SEO Title	Empty or identical across products?	The title in search results. Empty means Shopify uses the product name.
SEO Description	Empty?	The text below the title in search results.
Image Alt Text	Empty?	Image description for accessibility and for systems that can't see images.
Product Category	Empty or very broad?	Classification in Shopify's Standard Product Taxonomy, passed on to Google.

Note: a product with several variants or images takes several rows. Product fields like description and SEO title only appear in a product's first row. Variant fields like SKU and barcode appear in every variant row.

If you sell apparel, also check the Google fields for age group, gender and condition. They're stored as mm-google-shopping.* variant metafields. Whether they appear in the standard export depends on your setup; if not, you'll see them in Merchant Center in the next step.

Step 3: Google Merchant Center (3 minutes)

If your store is connected to Google via the Google & YouTube app:

1. Open Google Merchant Center.
2. Go to the products area and open the view with issues or warnings.
3. Sort by number of affected products.
4. Note the three most frequent issues, such as missing GTIN, missing age group or invalid values.

Google renames menus from time to time; look for the product diagnostics or issues view. Make corrections in Shopify, not Merchant Center, or the next sync overwrites them.

Prioritising the results

After ten minutes you have a list. Not everything is equally urgent. This order works well:

1. Everything Google flags as an error. Those products aren't shown at all.
2. Invalid GTINs. Better empty than wrong. Real GTINs are on the packaging or come from the manufacturer.
3. Missing required apparel fields (age group, gender, colour, size).
4. Empty or very short descriptions on your bestsellers.
5. Missing category and category metafields.
6. SEO titles, meta descriptions and alt texts.
7. Duplicate or missing SKUs.

Start with products that bring revenue. Ten well-maintained bestsellers do more than 200 half-maintained slow sellers.

Closing gaps directly in your store

If you'd rather not work column by column in a spreadsheet, Heartly helps as an app inside Shopify. It shows a visibility score per product for Google Shopping and AI assistants. The "Fix now" assistants (beta, paid plan) draft alt texts, SEO titles, meta descriptions and product descriptions only from existing facts and ask for two or three details when data is too thin. They also help with GTINs (type, scan or look up), SKUs, Google fields and the product category with category metafields. You review every change, a conflict check shows existing values, and everything can be undone for 30 days.

The 10-minute checklist

• Free visibility check done, key points noted.
• Products exported as CSV, filtered to active.
• Barcode/GTIN checked for empty and invalid values.
• SKU checked for empty and duplicate values.
• Description, SEO title, meta description and alt text checked for empty values.
• Product category checked for empty or overly broad values.
• Merchant Center: three most frequent product issues noted.
• Priority list created, bestsellers first.

FAQ

How often should I check my product data?

Once thoroughly, then whenever you import new products or make a bigger change. A quick look at Merchant Center once a month is enough for most small shops.

Does the free check need access to my admin?

No. It works with your store's public address. You don't install anything or enter any credentials.

What if my products have no GTIN?

Handmade products or one-offs often don't have one. That's fine. Leave the field empty instead of inventing a number, and make sure brand and category are right. In Merchant Center you can indicate that no identifier exists for such products.

Is it enough to maintain only bestsellers?

To start, yes. Bestsellers have the biggest effect. Then work through the rest of the catalog by category.

Get started

Step 1 takes two minutes: run the free visibility check. If you want to close the gaps directly in Shopify, find Heartly in the Shopify App Store: 14-day free trial, then $19 per month.