Analyze search performance

Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that reports how your store performs in search results: which queries showed your store, which pages are indexed, and which pages Google tried to read and could not.

Use this process to verify your store with Search Console, submit your sitemap, and read the reports it produces. It also covers what to check when your store is not appearing in search results at all.

Set Search Console up early, before you need it. Search data is not backfilled, so verifying today is what gives you something to compare against in three months.

Before you begin

You need:

• A Google account.
• Your store’s live domain, on a store that has been released. A store in Stealth Mode cannot be indexed.
• Access to either your DNS records or the store’s head content block.

Verify your store

Verification proves to Google that you own the site. Two of Google’s methods suit a StoreConnect store, and you only need one of them.

Use DNS verification if you can edit your domain’s DNS records. It covers every store on the domain at once, including subdomains, and it survives theme changes. Use HTML tag verification for a single store when you cannot reach the DNS records.

:::warning

Leave the verification record or tag in place permanently. Removing it unverifies the property, and you lose access to the reports and their history.

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Verify with a DNS record

1. Open Google Search Console and add a Domain property, entering your domain.
2. Copy the TXT record Google provides.
3. Add the TXT record to your domain’s DNS with your registrar or DNS host.
4. Return to Search Console and select Verify. DNS changes can take a few hours to propagate, so retry later if it fails the first time.
5. Confirm the property now appears in your Search Console property list.

Verify with an HTML tag

1. Open Google Search Console and add a URL prefix property, entering your store URL.
2. Choose the HTML tag method and copy the <meta> tag Google provides.
3. Add the tag to your store’s head content block. See Adding custom JavaScript, CSS and head content.
4. Publish the change, then view the page source of your live storefront and confirm the tag is there.
5. Return to Search Console and select Verify.

Submit your sitemap

StoreConnect generates a sitemap for each store automatically and refreshes it daily. Submitting it tells Google where to find every page you want indexed.

1. Open your-store.com/sitemap.xml in a browser and confirm it loads.
2. In Search Console, open Sitemaps and submit sitemap.xml.
3. Check back after a day or two. Search Console reports how many URLs it discovered and any it could not read.

Each store on a multi-store domain has its own sitemap, so submit each one against its own property. See Manage the sitemap for your store for what qualifies a record to appear in it.

:::note

Stores in Stealth Mode have no sitemap, and /sitemap.xml returns a 404. That is expected while a store is unreleased, and it also means the store cannot be indexed yet.

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Which reports to read

Report	What it answers	Worth checking
Performance	Which queries showed your store, and which were clicked	Monthly
Pages (indexing)	Which pages are indexed, and why others are not	Monthly
Sitemaps	Whether your sitemap was read, and how many URLs were found	After launch, then quarterly
Page experience	Loading speed and layout stability on real visits	Quarterly

Two patterns in the Performance report repay attention:

• Many impressions, few clicks — your Meta Title and Meta Description are not persuasive enough to earn the click. Both are a quick fix on the record itself. See SEO and site data.
• Queries you rank for but never targeted — content opportunities, in the shopper’s own words. This is the most reliable keyword research available to you, because it comes from your actual customers rather than an industry average.

When your store is not appearing

Work through these in order before assuming something is broken.

1. Give it time. A new store or page is not indexed immediately. Days to weeks is normal, and nothing you do speeds this up reliably.
2. Check the store is not in Stealth Mode. A stealth store is deliberately unavailable to search engines. See Stealth Mode.
3. Check robots.txt is not disallowing the pages. See Edit robots.txt to prevent search engine indexing.
4. Check for a stray noindex tag, particularly if the page was once a staging or test page. See How to implement ‘noindex’ tags on specific pages using Liquid.
5. Check the page is in your sitemap. If it is not, it has not met the conditions in Manage the sitemap for your store.
6. Check something links to the page from elsewhere on your store. A page nothing links to, and that is absent from the sitemap, has no route in.
7. Run the URL Inspection tool in Search Console on the specific page. It reports what Google saw on its last visit, and why the page was or was not indexed.

:::tip

Searching for your own store in Google is a poor test, because results are personalized and cached. The Pages report and URL Inspection tell you what is actually indexed.

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Other search engines

Bing Webmaster Tools works the same way and can import your Search Console settings rather than repeating the verification. It is worth doing once, since Bing results also feed several AI answer engines.

Search Console does not report on whether AI tools cite your store. See Answer engine and generative engine optimization (AEO/GEO) for how to check that separately.