If your developer says the filter pages are wasting crawl budget and someone in marketing wants every filtered URL indexed for long-tail traffic, you’re probably waiting to find out which of them is right. Faceted navigation SEO usually gets argued as a choice between those two camps: block every filter URL, or let Google have them all.

Neither works on a real catalog. One category with six filters can produce over half a million URL combinations, and almost none of them match anything a shopper types. A few do, and “black leather ankle boots” alone gets about 1,200 searches a month in the US. The job is to find those few, give them proper pages, and keep Google away from everything else, on Magento, Shopify, or any other platform.

What faceted navigation SEO decides

Faceted navigation SEO, sometimes called faceted search SEO, is the set of rules that decides which filter combinations on your category pages search engines may crawl and which they may index. Filters for color, size, brand, or price each add a parameter or path to the URL, and filters combine. The SEO work is choosing the small set of filtered pages that deserve to rank and keeping crawlers out of the rest.

Those are two separate decisions. Crawling is whether Googlebot fetches the URL at all. Indexing is whether the page can appear in search results. robots.txt controls the first, while canonical tags and noindex act on the second, and mixing them up causes many of the problems we find in store audits.

The scale is what makes it urgent. Take one category with six filters: 12 colors, 10 sizes, 20 brands, 5 price bands, 6 materials, and 4 sort orders. If a shopper can pick one value per filter, that category alone has about 630,000 possible URLs. Allow two colors at once, or let the parameters appear in any order, and the number keeps growing. Google’s own guidance on faceted navigation says filters can generate “infinite URL spaces”, and that crawlers often fetch many of these URLs before they recognize them as low value.

Crawl waste vs long-tail opportunity

Both arguments in your team are about real effects. Filter URLs do use up crawling that could go to new products, and some filter combinations do match searches your main categories can’t win. The answer is to measure each side on your own store before choosing.

Are filter pages wasting crawl budget?

They can be, once enough filter URLs are open to crawlers. Google’s crawl budget guide is written for sites with more than a million pages that change weekly, sites with 10,000+ pages that change daily, and sites with many URLs in “Discovered – currently not indexed”. A store with layered navigation can land in that last group with only a few thousand products, because the filters multiply the URL count far past the catalog size.

Three checks tell you whether it’s happening on your store:

1. In Search Console, open Settings and then the Crawl stats report. Compare the number of daily requests with the number of products and categories you sell, and look for filter parameters in the example URLs under each response type
2. In the Page indexing report, a large and growing “Discovered – currently not indexed” count full of filter URLs means Google keeps putting off crawling them. Our guide to Search Console statuses like duplicate without user-selected canonical explains how to read each status
3. In your server logs, group Googlebot requests by URL pattern. If filter and sort URLs take a bigger share of requests than product pages, crawling is going to the wrong place

The cost shows up as slower discovery. New products and price changes take longer to reach search, because Googlebot is busy with URLs like ?color=black&size=9&sort=price_asc.

Where the long-tail demand is

The opportunity is also real, but it shrinks fast as filters stack up. Here is the US search volume ladder for one footwear category, from Ahrefs in October 2026:

• ankle boots: 27,000 searches a month
• black ankle boots: 5,400
• black leather ankle boots: 1,200
• black leather ankle boots size 8: 0

The same pattern repeats in other categories. “Mens linen shirts” gets 8,200 searches and “blue linen shirt men” gets 300. “Green velvet sofa” gets 3,300. One attribute on top of a category often carries real demand, a second one sometimes does, and size, price, or availability on top of that almost never does.

The decision rule: which filter combinations deserve an indexable URL

A filter combination deserves an indexable URL when people search for it as a phrase, the parent category doesn’t already answer that search, enough products stay on the page, it adds no more than one or two filters to the category, and you can give it a stable page of its own. Every combination that fails any of these tests stays out of the index, and most should stay out of the crawl.

Run each candidate through the five tests in order. The first two decide most cases.

1. Search demand: check the phrase a shopper would type, such as “black leather ankle boots”, in a keyword tool for your main market. Pick one threshold for the whole catalog, for example 50 searches a month, and apply it the same way to every candidate
2. Different intent from the parent: someone searching “green velvet sofa” wants green velvet sofas and would be let down by the full sofa category. Someone searching “sofas under $1,000” is usually happy on the sofa category with a price filter. Color, material, style, brand, and use case tend to pass. Size, price, and availability tend to fail
3. Enough products, consistently: the page needs enough products to fill at least the first screen, in a range that doesn’t empty out every few weeks. A filter page that drops to zero products turns into a soft 404
4. One or two filters deep: a category plus one attribute, or plus two at most, like brand and type. Three or more filters almost never pass test 1
5. A stable page you can own: one clean URL, its own title, H1, and short intro copy, and links from the parent category. If your platform can only produce the combination as a parameter URL whose order changes, build a dedicated page for it instead

Everything that fails goes into one of two groups. Single filters with no demand can stay crawlable with a canonical tag pointing to the category, as long as their number stays small. Deeper combinations, sort orders, page-size options, and price ranges should be blocked from crawling.

Should filtered URLs be indexed?

Only the few that pass all five tests, and usually as dedicated pages. Next to the number of possible filter URLs, that list is short. Leaving the rest out of the index doesn’t cost traffic, because nobody searches for them, and it keeps the category pages as the clear target for their head terms. Our duplicate content guide covers what happens when thousands of near-identical filter pages compete with the category instead.

Index, noindex, canonical or robots.txt: what each does to filter URLs

Use robots.txt to stop crawling of filter URLs you never want in search, a canonical tag for small sets of single-filter pages that should pass their signals to the category, and a self-referencing canonical on the pages you chose to index. Noindex is rarely the right tool for faceted navigation, because Google still has to crawl a page to see the tag.

A few details from Google’s documentation matter here. A URL blocked in robots.txt can still be indexed without its content if other pages link to it. Google says a canonical tag on filter URLs may reduce crawling of them over time, but it calls robots.txt the more effective long-term control. Its crawl budget guide is direct about noindex: Google “will still request, but then drop the page”, so noindex saves no crawling at all.

Combinations that send mixed signals

A broken faceted navigation setup often has the right tools in the wrong combination.

• A robots.txt block plus noindex: Google can’t crawl the page, so it never sees the noindex
• Noindex plus a canonical to the category: one tag says drop the page, the other says merge it into the category. Google advises against noindex for canonicalization, so use the canonical alone
• A canonical to the category on a filter URL that’s in your sitemap or main menu: your internal signals point at the filter URL while the tag points away from it, and Google may ignore the tag
• Blocking filter URLs that are already indexed: they can stay in the index without content. If you need them gone first, allow crawling with noindex until they drop out, then add the robots.txt rule

How to build a filter page worth indexing

A filter combination that passed the five tests needs to work like a real category page. Otherwise Google may treat it as a near-duplicate of the parent and index the parent instead.

1. A clean, stable URL. A path such as /boots/black-leather-ankle-boots is easiest to keep stable. If you use parameters, keep one fixed order and the standard “&” separator, as Google recommends
2. A self-referencing canonical tag, never one pointing to the parent category
3. Its own title, H1, and meta description built on the phrase people search, such as “Black Leather Ankle Boots”
4. A short intro that helps shoppers choose between the products shown, with a few sentences on materials, fit, or care
5. Internal links from the parent category, for example a row of popular styles above or below the product grid, plus breadcrumbs back to the category
6. A place in the XML sitemap next to your regular categories
7. A plan for when stock runs out. Keep the page live with related products while the range is seasonal, and return a 404 or redirect to the parent if it’s gone for good

Filter UX still matters for shoppers on every other combination. Our guide to product listing page best practices covers filter order, labels, and mobile layouts.

Magento and Adobe Commerce implementation notes

By default, Magento adds each filter to the category URL as a query parameter with a numeric option ID, so a filtered page looks like /women/boots.html?color=49&material=148. That makes the parameters easy to block with robots.txt and hard to turn into pages worth indexing. The usual setup has three parts.

Canonical tags for filtered category URLs

Go to Stores > Settings > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization and set “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories” to Yes. Filtered URLs then point their canonical to the clean category URL. Adobe recommends enabling the canonical tag for both categories and products.

robots.txt rules for filter parameters

Add your rules under Content > Design > Configuration, in the Search Engine Robots section for the right scope. A typical starting set blocks filter, sort, and toolbar parameters:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?*color=
Disallow: /*?*material=
Disallow: /*?*price=
Disallow: /*?*product_list_order=
Disallow: /*?*product_list_dir=
Disallow: /*?*product_list_limit=
Disallow: /*?*product_list_mode=

Replace the attribute codes with the filterable attributes your store uses, and check the live URLs first. Headless frontends, AJAX filters, and search services such as Adobe’s Live Search can produce different parameters. Our guide to the Magento 2 robots.txt setup lists the system paths that belong in the same file.

Indexable filter pages as categories

Build each combination that passed the five tests as a category. Create a subcategory such as “Black Leather Ankle Boots” under Boots, with its own URL key, meta title, meta description, and description, and assign the products. On Adobe Commerce, the Visual Merchandiser can fill the category automatically with “Match products by rule”, using attribute conditions such as color and material. Adobe notes the rule is applied when the category is saved, and products that no longer match are removed. Link the new category from Boots, so shoppers and Google reach it from the parent.

How to choose filterable attributes, set up anchor categories, and speed up filtering with AJAX or Hyvä is covered in our guide to Magento layered navigation setup.

Shopify implementation notes

Shopify’s defaults already handle two of the three outcomes from the decision rule: canonical and block. We checked them on Shopify’s own Dawn demo store in October 2026. Storefront filters, which you set up in the admin or the Search & Discovery app, add parameters such as ?filter.v.option.color=Black or ?filter.p.vendor=Nike to the collection URL, and a store can have up to 25 filters.

What Shopify’s default robots.txt blocks

The standard file disallows sorted collection URLs, combined tag URLs, and any collection URL with two or more filter parameters:

Disallow: /collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /collections/*+*
Disallow: /collections/*filter*&*filter*
Disallow: /*/collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /*/collections/*+*
Disallow: /*/collections/*filter*&*filter*

A URL with a single filter stays crawlable. On the Dawn theme, that single-filter URL and even a two-filter one carry a canonical tag pointing to the unfiltered collection. So out of the box, single filters are canonicalized to the collection and combinations are blocked. Custom themes can change the canonical, so check yours with the URL Inspection tool.

The second set of lines covers language and market subfolders. If you sell in several countries through Shopify Markets subfolders, each subfolder repeats the whole filter space, so any rule you add needs the same pair.

Indexable filter pages as collections

Shopify has no admin setting that turns a filter URL into an indexable page, and the theme’s canonical points it at the collection anyway. Build each combination that passed the five tests as its own automated collection, with conditions such as product type equals Boots and a tag or metafield for black leather. It gets its own handle, title, description, and place in the sitemap, and you link to it from the parent collection.

Adding your own rules in robots.txt.liquid

To block single filters with no search value, such as availability or price, edit the robots.txt.liquid template and add rules for those parameters. Keep Shopify’s default rules in the file. Our Shopify SEO checklist covers the rest of the theme-level setup.

How to check faceted navigation after a release or migration

New filters, a theme update, or a replatforming project can undo a working setup in one deploy. Check four things after each one:

1. Fetch the live robots.txt and test a few filter URLs against it. A staging file that blocks everything, or a filter rule lost in the deploy, are both common release mistakes
2. Inspect one filter URL and one indexable filter page with the URL Inspection tool, and compare the user-declared and Google-selected canonical
3. Watch “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt” and “Discovered – currently not indexed” in the Page indexing report for new filter patterns over the following weeks
4. Check the Crawl stats report. A jump in daily requests right after the release usually means a new parameter became crawlable

Migrations need extra care because filter URLs change format between platforms. A Magento ?color=49 URL has no equivalent on Shopify, so every indexable filter page needs a matching page on the new platform and a 301 redirect in the redirect map, and the new robots.txt rules need to be live on launch day. Our SEO migration checklist covers the full redirect and launch process.

A technical SEO audit checks crawl rules, canonicals, and status codes across every template in one pass. It’s also where our eCommerce SEO team starts when filter URLs outnumber the products on a store.

Frequently asked questions about faceted navigation SEO

Are filter pages wasting crawl budget?

They can be, if search engines can crawl every filter combination. Check the Crawl Stats report in Search Console and your server logs for the share of Googlebot requests that go to filter and sort URLs. A growing “Discovered – currently not indexed” count full of filter URLs is another sign. Blocking combinations with no search value in robots.txt is the fix Google recommends.

Should filtered URLs be indexed?

Only the ones people search for. A filter combination deserves an indexable URL when the phrase has search demand, the intent differs from the parent category, enough products stay on the page, it adds no more than one or two filters, and it has a stable page with its own title and copy. Everything else should stay out of the index.

Should I use noindex or a canonical tag on filter pages?

Use a canonical tag pointing to the category for a small set of single-filter pages, and robots.txt for everything deeper. Noindex keeps a page out of search but saves no crawling, because Google still has to fetch the page to read the tag. Never combine noindex with a canonical to another URL, since the two send opposite signals.

Is robots.txt or rel=canonical better for faceted navigation?

For filter combinations you never want in search, robots.txt is better, and Google calls it the more effective long-term control. A canonical tag still lets Google crawl the URLs and only reduces crawling over time. Use canonicals for the few single-filter pages that should pass their signals to the category, and robots.txt for the rest.

Should sort and page-size URLs be indexed?

No. Sorting by price or showing 48 products per page changes the order and number of products, but the page targets the same search as the category. Block these parameters in robots.txt. Shopify’s default robots.txt already blocks sort_by URLs on collections, and on Magento you add rules for the product_list parameters yourself.

How many filters can a page combine and still be worth indexing?

Usually one, sometimes two. Search demand drops fast as filters stack up. In the US, “black ankle boots” gets about 5,400 searches a month, “black leather ankle boots” about 1,200, and adding a size brings it to zero. Pages with three or more filters almost never have enough demand to justify their own URL.

Do AJAX filters solve faceted navigation SEO?

They solve the crawl side, but they don’t help the long tail. If filters update the product grid without changing the URL, there are no filter URLs to crawl or index. That also means no filter page can rank, so you still need dedicated category or collection pages for the combinations people search for.

What happens to filter pages when you migrate platforms?

Their URLs change, because every platform formats filters differently. List the filter pages that get organic traffic before the migration, build matching category or collection pages on the new platform, and 301 redirect the old URLs to them. Set the new robots.txt filter rules before launch, so the new store doesn’t open its full filter space to crawlers on day one.

Faceted navigation SEO comes down to a short list

Faceted navigation SEO is mostly a list: the filter combinations that earn their own page, and a rule that blocks the rest. Build the list from search demand, give each entry a proper category or collection page, block deep combinations, sort orders, and price ranges in robots.txt, and recheck the setup after every release. Review the list each season too, because new filters and new ranges change which phrases have demand.

Not sure which of your filter pages belong in Google? Send us a category URL, and we'll show you which combinations to index and which to block.

The post Faceted Navigation SEO: Which Filter Pages to Index and Which to Block appeared first on scandiweb.

If you’ve just forwarded a Search Console email to your developer asking “is this bad?”, or you’re looking at thousands of URLs marked “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”, you probably want one answer: is any of it costing the store sales?

On most online stores, the answer is no. Google’s own help page says that not indexed “is not necessarily bad”, and a store creates far more URLs than it wants in search: color variants, sorted and filtered categories, tracking parameters, cart and account pages. This guide goes through the statuses that stores see most, with a store example for each, a verdict on whether to act, and the fix when you should.

What the Page indexing report is telling you

The Page indexing report in Google Search Console lists every URL Google knows on your site and sorts the ones it didn’t index by reason. Google’s stated goal is to get the canonical version of every important page indexed, and it says you should not expect all URLs on your site to be indexed. So the useful question for each status is whether the URLs in it are pages you want customers to find.

Start with two numbers before reading any status. Compare the count of indexed pages with the number of products and categories you actually sell, then check whether the indexed count dropped recently. A store with 4,000 products and 400 categories that has 4,600 pages indexed is in decent shape, whatever the not indexed column says.

Duplicate without user-selected canonical on an online store

“Duplicate without user-selected canonical” means Google found a page that is a duplicate of another page, the page has no canonical tag saying which version you prefer, and Google picked a different URL to index. Google says this is not an error and is working as intended, because it doesn’t show duplicate pages in search. On a store, it mostly collects parameter URLs for variants and sort orders.

Google groups pages by how similar their content is. Every URL in the group except the one it chose as canonical lands in this status, so a big count often just means your store generates a lot of URL versions of the same page.

Product variants and color URLs

Many platforms and themes create a URL per variant, such as /rain-jacket?color=blue or /rain-jacket?size=m. If the only difference is the selected swatch, Google treats those URLs as copies of the main product page and indexes one of them. That is usually fine, as long as the URL it keeps is the clean product URL.

It becomes a choice when the variants are different enough to earn their own searches. A sofa sold in eight fabrics may deserve separate pages for “green velvet sofa”, while a T-shirt in five sizes doesn’t. Decide per product type, then make the canonical tags follow that decision.

Sorted, filtered, and tracking URLs

Sorting a category by price, showing 48 products per page, or arriving from a newsletter link with a utm_source tag adds a parameter to the URL while the products shown stay the same. Google’s own documentation uses a category URL with a gclid ad parameter as its example of a duplicate. These URLs belong in this status.

Filters are different, because some filter pages match real searches. If “black leather boots” brings in buyers through a filter URL, that page needs its own canonical and a place in your internal links. Our guide to layered navigation explains how to choose which filter pages stay indexable.

Products assigned to several categories

On Magento (Adobe Commerce) in particular, a product that sits in three categories can be reachable at three category paths, such as /men/jackets/rain-jacket and /sale/rain-jacket. Without a canonical tag, Google picks one of them. Platform settings can add a canonical tag to product pages or drop category paths from product URLs entirely, and either one keeps the count down. The duplicate content guide covers the other sources of duplication on stores, from trailing slashes to manufacturer descriptions.

When this status is a problem

Look at the example URLs in the status and filter for the ones you care about. It’s a problem in two cases. Your main product or category URL appears in the list, which means Google indexed a parameter or variant URL instead of it. Or the same content is indexed under the HTTP and HTTPS, or www and non-www, versions of your domain, which points to a redirect gap our guide to HTTP and WWW in URLs explains.

How to fix it

1. Inspect one affected URL with the URL Inspection tool and read the “Google-selected canonical” line
2. If Google chose the right page, leave it, because the status is working as intended
3. If Google chose the wrong page, add a self-referencing canonical tag to the page you want indexed and point the duplicates at it
4. Link to the canonical URL in menus, breadcrumbs, and product grids, so internal links stop pointing at parameter versions
5. List only canonical URLs in your XML sitemap

Google treats redirects and canonical tags as strong signals and sitemaps as a weak one, so the canonical tag and internal links do most of the work. Google also advises against using robots.txt or noindex to handle duplicates. A blocked duplicate can still be indexed without its content, and noindex removes the page from search altogether. For stores with several countries or languages, each version needs its own canonical and matching hreflang, which our hreflang and canonical guide walks through.

Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user

This sister status means you did set a canonical tag, and Google indexed a different URL anyway. It is worth more of your time, because a tag that Google overrules usually points to a mixed signal: the canonical says one URL, while internal links, the sitemap, or redirects point to another. Inspect the URL, compare the “User-declared canonical” with the “Google-selected canonical”, and make every signal point the same way. If two categories really have the same products, merging them is often the cleaner fix.

Crawled – currently not indexed

“Crawled – currently not indexed” means Googlebot fetched and read the page, then decided not to add it to the index for now. Google says the page may or may not be indexed in the future and that there’s no need to resubmit it. On a store, this status usually collects thin or near-identical pages.

Google doesn’t give a reason per URL, so read the list for patterns. In store audits, the same groups come up again and again.

• Categories or brand pages with one or two products and no copy
• Product pages that use the manufacturer’s description, which hundreds of other retailers also publish
• Tag, archive, or internal search pages that repeat the category listings
• Out-of-stock products that show little more than a name, a price, and a “notify me” button
• New pages that Google crawled once and hasn’t come back to yet

If the list holds pages you’d never link from a campaign, leave it. If it holds bestsellers or main categories, the fix is to make the page worth indexing: write category copy that answers what buyers compare, rewrite product descriptions for your top sellers, link to the page from the menu or related categories, and merge categories too small to stand on their own. Google says there’s no need to resubmit these URLs, so the time is better spent on the page itself.

Discovered – currently not indexed

“Discovered – currently not indexed” means Google knows the URL exists, usually from a link or a sitemap, but hasn’t crawled it yet. Google says it typically postponed the crawl because crawling at that moment was expected to overload the site, which is why the report shows no last crawl date. On a store, a growing count points to too many URLs, a slow server, or both.

A few hundred URLs here after a product launch is normal and clears as Google catches up. A count that keeps climbing is a sign Google is spending its crawl on URLs that don’t matter. Google’s crawl budget guide is written for sites with more than a million pages, sites with 10,000+ pages that change daily, and sites where a large share of URLs sit in this exact status, which can include a mid-size catalog with layered navigation.

These are the usual causes on a store, each with its fix.

1. Filter combinations can create millions of crawlable URLs. Block crawling of the ones you don’t want indexed in robots.txt, as Google’s faceted navigation guide recommends, and return a 404 for filter combinations that show no products
2. The server is slow or returns errors under load. Check the Crawl stats report in Search Console for slow response times, then fix hosting or caching first
3. Soft 404s and long redirect chains keep getting recrawled, so fix those and Google has more crawl left for real pages
4. The XML sitemap lists filtered, redirected, or noindexed URLs. Keep it to canonical, indexable product and category pages
5. Important new pages have few internal links. Link new categories and products from the menu, the homepage, or a parent category

If you run Magento, our guide to a Magento robots.txt setup shows which paths are safe to block.

Other statuses stores see, and the fix for each

The remaining statuses are mostly confirmations that your setup works. Two of them, soft 404 and server errors, need action on most stores.

Alternate page with proper canonical tag

This page points to another page as canonical, and Google indexed that page. Google says there is nothing you need to do. Filtered categories, sorted views, and variant URLs with a correct canonical tag all belong here, so a large count is a good sign.

Soft 404

A soft 404 is a page that looks like a “not found” page to Google but returns a 200 status code. On stores, the usual cases are empty categories, internal search pages with no results, and sold-out products whose page only says the item is unavailable. Keep temporarily sold-out products live with their full description, a stock message, and alternatives. Return a real 404 or 410 for products gone for good, or 301 redirect them to a replacement. Google’s crawl budget guide notes that soft 404 pages keep getting crawled, so they cost crawl as well as rankings.

Not found (404)

Google says 404s are not necessarily a problem if the page was removed without a replacement. Discontinued products with no successor can stay 404. Act when the list includes URLs that still get traffic or backlinks, or old URLs that moved, which should 301 redirect to the new page. Our guide to 404 page tracking shows how to spot the ones that still get visits.

Page with redirect

The URL redirects to another page, so Google indexes the target instead. After a migration, this status fills up with old product and category URLs, which is exactly what should happen. Check that the redirects go straight to the final URL in one hop, and that the SEO migration checklist steps for your redirect map were done.

Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag

The page carries a noindex directive, so Google left it out. Cart, checkout, account, wishlist, and internal search pages should be here. Look through the examples for product or category templates. A staging noindex left on after go-live also shows up here.

Blocked by robots.txt and indexed, though blocked

“Blocked by robots.txt” means Google didn’t crawl the URL because your robots.txt file disallows it, which is expected for checkout, account, and filter paths you blocked on purpose. Robots.txt only controls crawling, so a blocked URL with links pointing to it can still appear in search without its content. Google files those under “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt”. To keep a page out of search, remove the robots.txt block and use noindex instead, since Google can only see a noindex tag on a page it is allowed to crawl.

Server error (5xx)

Googlebot couldn’t reach the page because the server failed, timed out, or was busy. Treat it as a hosting problem first. Match the dates in the report against traffic peaks, deployments, and sales, because a store that slows down every time a campaign starts is also slow for customers.

When to ignore a Search Console status

Ignore a status when the URLs in it are pages you don’t want in search, or when Google indexed the right version of the page under another URL. Act when your product, category, or content pages that should earn traffic appear in the examples, or when the indexed page count drops while the store’s catalog didn’t shrink.

Run each status through the same four questions, in this order.

1. Should this URL be in Google at all? Cart, checkout, account, search results, sort orders, and tracking parameters: no, so leave them
2. Is the page indexed under another URL? Inspect it and read the Google-selected canonical. If that is the URL you want, you’re done
3. Is the count growing week over week? A flat count can wait, while one that grows every week needs a look
4. Did the indexed page count drop at the same time? Google suggests looking for a matching rise in not indexed URLs, and checking robots.txt, noindex tags, and login requirements first

How to fix and validate an indexing issue

Fix the cause on the template, then tell Google. On a store, one setting or theme file usually produces thousands of affected URLs, so one change clears the whole group.

1. Open the status and export the examples. The list is limited to 1,000 rows, so treat it as a sample of the full set
2. Group the URLs by template or pattern, such as product, category, filter parameter, or search page
3. Inspect two or three URLs per group with the URL Inspection tool to see the live status and the Google-selected canonical
4. Fix the template, setting, or rule behind the group, and test it on a few URLs with a live test
5. Click “Validate fix” in the report. Google says validation typically takes up to about two weeks and sometimes longer

If the same statuses keep coming back after every release, add them to your release checks. A technical SEO audit checks canonicals, robots rules, and status codes across every template in one pass, and it’s where our eCommerce SEO team starts when a store’s indexing numbers look wrong.

Frequently asked questions about Search Console indexing errors

Is duplicate without user-selected canonical bad for SEO?

Usually not. Google says duplicate without user-selected canonical is not an error, because it means Google found a copy of another page and indexed the other version. On a store, those copies are mostly variant, sort, and tracking URLs. It’s only a problem when your main product or category URL is the one left out, which you can check with the URL Inspection tool.

How do I fix crawled – currently not indexed?

Make the page worth indexing. Google crawled it and decided to leave it out, so resubmitting the URL doesn’t help. On a store, add unique copy to thin categories, rewrite manufacturer product descriptions for your bestsellers, link the page from menus or related categories, and merge categories with only a few products. Ignore the status for pages you never wanted in search.

How long does Google take to index pages after a fix?

Google says a Validate fix request in Search Console typically takes up to about two weeks, and sometimes longer. Individual pages can be indexed sooner, especially ones with strong internal links. Large stores take longer because Google has to recrawl many URLs. Fix the template first and validate once, which saves requesting indexing for pages one at a time.

Should out-of-stock products be noindexed?

No, not if they’re coming back. Keep temporarily out-of-stock products indexed with their full description, a clear stock message, and alternatives, so they keep their rankings. A page reduced to a short “unavailable” message can be treated as a soft 404. For products discontinued for good, redirect to a replacement or the closest category, or return a 404 or 410.

Does blocking a page in robots.txt keep it out of Google?

Not reliably. Robots.txt stops Google from crawling a page, but the URL can still be indexed without its content if other pages link to it. Google lists those under “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt”. To keep a page out of search results, allow crawling and add a noindex tag, because Google can only read the tag on a page it can crawl.

Why does Google show the wrong snippet for my product page?

Google builds snippets mostly from the page content and uses your meta description only when it describes the page better for that search. If the snippet shows old text, a shipping banner, or a cookie notice, rewrite the meta description to match the page, and make sure the main description appears early in the HTML. The data-nosnippet attribute keeps parts of the page out of snippets.

Why does Google show the wrong price or currency for my products?

Google reads price and currency from your product structured data and from Merchant Center. Wrong values usually come from markup that lists the default variant’s price, a price loaded with JavaScript after the page renders, or one currency used for every country. Test the page with the Rich Results Test and check that the price and priceCurrency match what customers see. Our product structured data guide lists the fields Google uses.

Why are my products disapproved in Merchant Center?

The cause stores run into most is a mismatch between the feed and the product page, usually on price or availability. Merchant Center checks the feed against your page and its structured data, so a sale price missing from the feed or a variant URL that shows another price can trigger it. Update the product feed more often, fix the markup, and use the right currency per country. Google recrawls disapproved products within hours or days.

Fix the statuses that touch the pages you sell

Duplicate without user-selected canonical, crawled – currently not indexed, and the other Page indexing statuses are mostly Google telling you how it handled the extra URLs your store creates. Start from the pages you sell from, check whether each one is indexed under the URL you want, and fix the template behind any group that includes them. Leave the rest, and check each month whether the counts are growing.

Search Console report full of statuses and no time to sort them? Send us the export, and we'll tell you which ones are costing you traffic.

The post Duplicate Without User-Selected Canonical and Other Search Console Errors appeared first on scandiweb.

It’s the Tuesday after go-live. The new store looks better than the old one, orders are coming in, and the organic sessions line in GA4 is pointing down. Nobody knows yet whether it’s a tracking problem or customers who can’t find you anymore.

This SEO migration checklist is written to keep you out of that meeting. Most migration checklists are built for brochure sites with fifty pages. An online store has thousands of product URLs, category pages that rank, filter combinations, variants, out-of-stock items, and review markup, and each of them can lose rankings in its own way. The checklist below covers those, then ends with the order we check things in when traffic drops after launch anyway.

What an SEO migration checklist for eCommerce covers

An SEO migration checklist for eCommerce has four phases: an inventory and baseline before launch, a redirect map that covers every URL that ranks or earns links, checks on staging, and monitoring for the first 30 days after go-live. Most lost traffic traces back to steps skipped in the first two phases.

If you’re still deciding between replatforming and upgrading, start with our guide to Magento to Shopify migration, which covers costs and what data moves. This checklist assumes the decision is made.

Before launch: build the URL inventory and a baseline

Website migration SEO starts with a complete list of what you have today and how it performs. Without that list, you can’t map redirects. Without the baseline, you can’t tell a normal post-launch dip from a real loss.

1. Crawl the current store, including parameter and pagination URLs
2. Export every URL with clicks from Search Console for the last 12 months, so seasonal pages make the list
3. Pull organic revenue by landing page from GA4, and the pages with the most backlinks from your SEO tool
4. Record a baseline per page template: organic sessions, clicks, revenue, and rankings for your top 50–100 keywords
5. Freeze content and URL changes on the old site until launch

Which URLs an online store can’t afford to lose

Rank the inventory by value before anyone writes a redirect. In most stores, a small group of category pages and filter pages that rank for specific searches (“black leather boots”, “men’s waterproof jackets”), plus the bestselling products, bring in most of the organic revenue. Buying guides and blog posts often hold most of the backlinks. Those groups get mapped and tested by hand. The long tail gets mapped by rule.

Build the redirect map

Redirect mapping means pairing every old URL that earns traffic or links with the closest matching new URL and a permanent 301 or 308 redirect. Google recommends keeping redirect chains short, ideally no more than three hops, and keeping redirects in place for at least a year. On a store, the map usually runs to thousands of rows, so most of it is built by rule and the top pages are checked by hand.

Avoid sending large groups of products to the homepage. Google tends to treat those as soft 404s, so the old page’s rankings disappear anyway. If you’re on Magento, our guide to 301 redirect mapping covers how to build and import the map.

Nuclear Blast, a metal record label, moved from a legacy platform built in the 2000s to Magento 2. We restructured its URLs around keywords with year-round demand, mapped every old page to its new destination, and implemented more than 100,000 301 redirects. Organic traffic on the .com store grew 227% YoY after the migration.

Read more: Website Migration Case Study: A Story of 100k Redirects for Nuclear Blast

eCommerce details most migration checklists miss

Generic website migration checklists stop at redirects and metadata. Stores lose rankings in places those lists don’t mention: filter URLs, variants, products that go out of stock, structured data, and international store views. Check each of these against the new platform before launch, because the defaults differ from one platform to the next.

Filters and faceted navigation

Decide which filter combinations deserve their own indexable page before launch. If the old store ranked for “red dresses” through a filter URL, the new store needs an equivalent page, or that traffic goes to a competitor. Everything else should stay out of the index through canonicals or noindex. Our guide to layered navigation explains the rules.

Variants and configurable products

A Magento configurable product with ten sizes can become one product with ten variants, or ten separate products, depending on how the new platform and the import handle it. Pick one canonical URL per product and redirect any old child-product URLs to it. Otherwise you split ranking signals across near-identical pages, which our duplicate content guide covers in detail.

Out-of-stock and discontinued products

Keep temporarily out-of-stock products live on their own URLs with a clear stock message. Redirect discontinued products to a replacement or the closest category. A migration is a good moment to clean out years of dead products, as long as each one with traffic or backlinks gets a proper redirect.

Structured data and reviews

Product, Offer, Review, and Breadcrumb markup often breaks in new templates, and reviews can vanish if the reviews app isn’t migrated before launch. Losing them costs you star ratings and price snippets in search results. Validate the markup on staging and confirm the review count per product matches the old store. Our guide to product structured data lists the fields that matter.

International stores and hreflang

Every hreflang annotation has to point at the new URLs, and each language version needs a self-referencing canonical. Store views that merge or split during a migration need their own redirect logic. Our hreflang and canonical playbook covers the setup.

B2B catalogs behind a login

B2B stores often hide prices or whole catalogs behind a login, so Google never indexed much of the old store. A migration is the time to decide which product data goes public, since buyers and AI assistants can only recommend what they can read. Our B2B SEO guide explains how to open the catalog without exposing negotiated prices.

Pre-launch checks on staging

Run the checks on staging two to three weeks before launch, while there’s still time to fix templates. Keep staging closed with a password rather than relying on robots.txt alone, so nothing gets indexed early.

1. Crawl staging and compare titles, meta descriptions, H1s, and canonicals against the old store for your top pages
2. Test the redirect map against staging and fix every 404, 302, and chain longer than one hop
3. Validate structured data on product, category, and article templates
4. Check that internal links, menus, and breadcrumbs point straight to the new URLs
5. Generate the new XML sitemap and confirm it lists only indexable, canonical URLs
6. Confirm GA4, Google Tag Manager, and purchase events fire on the new templates
7. Compare page speed on the main templates with the old store

A technical SEO audit on staging covers most of this list in one pass.

Launch day: the first 24 hours

On launch day, the job is to make the new store crawlable and prove that redirects and tracking work. Remove the migration-only blocks, publish the redirects, submit the new sitemap, and test your top URLs by hand before anyone celebrates.

1. Remove staging noindex tags and robots.txt blocks
2. Publish the redirects and test your top 100 URLs by value
3. Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console
4. Use Google’s Change of Address tool only if the domain changes, because it doesn’t apply to replatforming on the same domain
5. Place a test order and confirm the purchase appears in GA4
6. Crawl the live site and compare the results with the staging crawl

Search Console may warn that URLs in the old sitemap redirect. Google’s documentation says that’s normal.

The first 30 days after launch

Expect rankings to move for a few weeks. Google says a small or medium site takes a few weeks for most pages to move, and larger sites take longer. Check Search Console daily for the first two weeks, then weekly until traffic settles. These four views catch most problems.

• New 404s and redirect errors in the Pages report
• Indexing status of your top product and category pages
• Rankings for your top 50–100 keywords against the baseline
• Organic revenue by page template, not only total sessions

Kouboo, a Los Angeles home décor retailer, moved from Magento 2 to Shopify in May 2020 with redirect mapping, migrated metadata, and a pre-launch technical audit in place. Organic traffic dipped 8–9% after launch and recovered within a month. Organic revenue later grew 107% compared with the pre-migration period.

Read more: Case study: SEO program secures migration and drives 107% organic growth for Kouboo.com

Traffic dropped after launch? Check in this order

When organic traffic drops after a website migration, check tracking first, then redirects, then indexing, then templates, and only then real demand. Each step is quicker than the next, and the first three explain most drops we see. Compare against your pre-launch baseline at every step.

1. Check tracking first. Compare Search Console clicks with GA4 organic sessions, and if clicks held steady while sessions fell, the tags are broken and SEO is fine
2. Test the redirects on the old URLs that brought the most traffic, looking for 404s, 302s, chains, and products sent to the homepage
3. Check indexing for leftover noindex tags, robots.txt blocks, and canonicals pointing at staging or old URLs. The Search Console Pages report shows which templates dropped out
4. Compare old and new templates for lost copy, titles, internal links, and filter pages that no longer exist
5. Check real demand last, comparing seasonality with last year and looking for a Google algorithm update in the same week

If the drop holds after these checks, our eCommerce SEO team starts from the same list.

How long does SEO recovery take after a migration?

A well-run store migration usually recovers its organic traffic within a few weeks. Google says most pages on a small or medium site move in that time, and larger sites take longer. Kouboo, above, was back to its pre-launch traffic within a month. Shopify’s migration guidance treats a 5–10% dip in the first week as normal and a sustained drop above 20% as a sign that something is broken.

Large catalogs take longer because Google has to recrawl tens of thousands of product URLs. A drop that keeps growing after the first month almost always has a cause on the checklist above.

Frequently asked questions about SEO migration

Will a website migration hurt my SEO?

A website migration usually causes a short dip while Google recrawls the new URLs, and it shouldn’t hurt rankings long term if redirects and page metadata carry over. The damage comes from skipped steps: missing redirects, leftover noindex tags, lost category content, or broken tracking that hides what is happening. A complete SEO migration checklist prevents most of it.

How long should 301 redirects stay in place after a migration?

Keep 301 redirects in place for at least a year, and longer if you can. Google recommends at least one year so it can transfer signals to the new URLs, and old links on other websites keep sending visitors long after that. On a store, there is rarely a good reason to remove redirects that still receive traffic.

Should you redirect out-of-stock products?

No, keep temporarily out-of-stock products live on their own URL with a clear stock message and related alternatives. Redirect a product only when it is discontinued for good, to a replacement product or the closest category. Avoid redirecting discontinued products to the homepage, because Google often treats that as a soft 404.

Do you need Google’s Change of Address tool when replatforming?

Only if the domain or subdomain changes. Google’s Change of Address tool applies to moves from one domain to another. If you replatform from Magento to Shopify and keep the same domain, you don’t need it. You still need redirects for every URL that changes, plus a new XML sitemap submitted in Search Console.

What should an SEO migration checklist include?

An SEO migration checklist should include a crawl and URL inventory, a traffic and revenue baseline, a redirect map, checks for filters, variants, and structured data, a staging audit, launch-day tests, and 30 days of monitoring. For online stores, it also needs rules for out-of-stock and discontinued products and a triage order for traffic drops.

Why did my traffic drop after a website migration?

Most traffic drops after a migration come from broken tracking, missing or wrong redirects, pages blocked from indexing, or templates that lost content and internal links. Check them in that order against your pre-launch baseline. If all of them pass, compare with last year’s seasonality and check for a Google update in the same week.

Run the checklist before the launch date is fixed

An SEO migration checklist does most of its work six to eight weeks before launch, when there’s still time to fix templates and finish the redirect map. Build the inventory and baseline first, decide how filters, variants, and discontinued products behave on the new platform, and test everything on staging. After go-live, watch Search Console daily and work through the triage order before assuming the worst.

Launch date on the calendar and no redirect map yet? Tell us what you're migrating, and we'll show you which URLs to protect first.

The post SEO Migration Checklist for eCommerce: Protect Rankings Before and After Launch appeared first on scandiweb.

If your organic traffic has gone flat while more new leads tell your sales team they found you on ChatGPT, you are seeing B2B SEO split in two. Fewer buyers click through from Google: AI Overviews have cut the click-through rate of the top result by 58%, according to Ahrefs. More of the research now happens inside AI assistants, and in a 2026 Semrush survey, 92% of US B2B buyers said AI had shaped their vendor shortlist. That shortlist rarely changes. 6sense found that 94% of buying groups rank their preferred vendors before they contact anyone.

So B2B SEO in 2027 has two jobs. It still has to win the searches that click through to your site. It also has to make you the supplier that Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity name when a buyer asks who makes the part they need and ships it to their region. Both jobs run on the same work: product pages that machines can read, and answers to the questions your buyers actually ask.

This guide covers how B2B buyers search now, how B2B SEO differs from B2C, and an eight-step strategy for manufacturers and distributors, with examples from our own client work.

What is B2B SEO in 2027?

B2B SEO is the work of getting a business-to-business company found by buyers in search engines and AI assistants. In 2027 it covers two goals: ranking in Google for the searches that still bring clicks, and being named and cited when buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews to recommend suppliers. Both depend on clear, crawlable product information and trusted mentions.

For a manufacturer or distributor, SEO looks different from the SaaS advice that fills most guides. Your site is often a catalog of thousands of products with specs, documents, and customer-specific prices. Your buyers search for part numbers, standards, and applications as often as for your brand. And the person who finds you is rarely the only one who decides.

How B2B buyers search for suppliers now

B2B buyers now start much of their supplier research in AI assistants, use search to check what the AI told them, and contact a seller late. The numbers from 2025 and 2026 point the same way.

• AI use is mainstream. In the Semrush survey of 622 US B2B professionals, 66% regularly use AI to research vendors, and 97% had found a vendor they didn’t know about through AI. ChatGPT (76%) and Gemini (62%) were the most used. Semrush sells SEO tools, so treat the exact figures with care.
• Many start in a chatbot. G2 found that 51% of B2B software buyers now begin their research in an AI chatbot rather than a search engine.
• The shortlist forms early. In 6sense’s 2025 study, buyers were 61% of the way through their journey before contacting a seller, and they bought from their early favorite 77% of the time.
• Google sends fewer clicks. Ahrefs measured a 58% drop in click-through rate for the top result on searches that show an AI Overview.

The traffic that does come from AI is worth having. Adobe found that AI-referred visits to US retail sites converted 42% better than other traffic in March 2026, a year after converting 38% worse. That is retail data, but the direction matches what we see on B2B stores: fewer visits, better informed visitors.

How B2B SEO differs from B2C SEO

B2B SEO targets fewer, more specific searches from buyers with long decision cycles, and it measures success in qualified leads, quotes, and reorders, with traffic as a supporting number. The catalog, the buying group, and the sales team all change what good SEO looks like.

The biggest difference for manufacturers and distributors is the catalog. Many B2B stores hide specs, documents, and even product names behind a customer login. Google can’t rank what it can’t crawl, and an AI assistant can’t recommend a product it has never read.

B2B SEO strategy for 2027: 8 steps

A B2B SEO strategy for 2027 starts with the product data that search engines and AI assistants read, then adds the answers, mentions, and technical basics that earn rankings and citations. These eight steps are the order we use with manufacturers and distributors.

1. Open your catalog to crawlers

Make product names, specs, compatibility, and documents public, and keep only customer-specific prices and ordering behind the login. That single change usually adds more search visibility than any content campaign, because it gives Google and AI assistants thousands of pages they couldn’t see before.

Supplier data is often what keeps the catalog closed. Wainbee, the largest distributor of Parker products in Canada, had only 10% of its 600,000+ products online because supplier data arrived as CSV and XLS files with no common structure. A Pimcore PIM connected to its ERP and supplier feeds standardized the formats and put the full catalog online.

Read more: Case Study: Unifying Product Information with Pimcore PIM

2. Build product pages for buyers and machines

A B2B product page should answer an engineer’s questions on the page itself: a full spec table, compatible and substitute products, certifications, downloadable documents, and lead time. Add product structured data so search engines and AI tools can read the same facts without guessing.

Those facts are also what AI assistants quote. When a buyer asks ChatGPT for a stainless fitting with a specific thread and pressure rating, the supplier whose page states both clearly has a far better chance of being named. Our guides to product structured data and product detail page best practices cover the details.

3. Answer the questions your sales team hears every week

Collect the questions your sales and support teams answer most, and publish clear answers on category pages, product pages, and guides. AI assistants pull answers from pages that state them directly, so a short, plain answer near the top of a page beats a long article that buries it.

This is also where AI visibility starts. Enviropack, a UK supplier of eco-friendly food packaging, aligned its SEO and Google Business Profile copy with the words buyers use when they shortlist suppliers. It started appearing in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers for prompts such as “eco-friendly food packaging suppliers in the UK,” and sessions from ChatGPT grew 110% in three months.

Read more: How AEO Helped Enviropack Become a Top AI Pick for Sustainable Packaging

4. Target problems and applications as well as product names

B2B keyword research finds small searches with high value. Product and part-number terms matter, but so do the problems buyers describe before they know what to buy: “how to reduce downtime on a packaging line,” “food-safe lubricant for conveyors,” or “replacement for a discontinued valve.” Build category pages and guides around those applications and link them to the products that solve them.

Expect low numbers. A term searched 50 times a month by maintenance managers can be worth more than a consumer keyword searched 50,000 times. In AI assistants, these problem-style questions are how most buyers phrase their first prompt.

5. Get mentioned on the sites AI assistants trust

AI assistants build their answers from pages they consider reliable: industry directories, trade publications, review sites, comparison articles, forums, and your partners’ websites. Listings in the right directories, accurate partner and distributor pages, case studies with named clients, and expert quotes in trade press all raise the chance that you are named.

Treat these mentions like links in classic SEO. They tell both Google and AI models who you are, what you make, and where you sell. Our backlink building guide covers how to earn them without paying for low-quality placements.

6. Fix the technical basics for a large catalog

Large B2B catalogs break SEO in predictable ways: filtered category URLs that create millions of near-duplicate pages, slow product pages, broken parent-child product links, and redirects lost in a replatforming. Fix crawl waste first, so search engines spend their time on the pages that matter.

FELCO, the Swiss maker of professional pruning shears, shows how much the basics can return. We cleaned up its technical SEO and crawl paths, expanded the category tree, restructured navigation, rewrote category and product page content, and localized SEO for its European markets, with direct answers and structured data for AI engines. Its DTC revenue grew 107.87% YoY in 2025, and SEO revenue in Black Friday week rose 334.4%.

Read more: Case Study: Doubling DTC Revenue for a 75-Year-Old Swiss Tool Brand in 6 Months

If you are planning a migration, our SEO migration checklist covers every step from the redirect map to the first 30 days, and our guides to a technical SEO audit and 301 redirect mapping go deeper on those two checks. If you are still deciding whether to replatform at all, our guide to a Magento upgrade or Shopify migration compares the costs and what data moves.

7. Let AI crawlers in and read your logs

Decide which AI crawlers may read your site, set that in robots.txt and in your CDN, and check that the search crawlers behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI features are not blocked by accident. Many stores block them without knowing, often through a CDN bot rule.

Then look at your server logs. AI crawlers read far more pages than they send visitors back: Cloudflare Radar data for July 2026 shows roughly 1,917 pages crawled per referral for Anthropic and 251 for OpenAI, against about 5 for Google, according to an analysis of Radar figures. That crawling is buyer research happening off your site. Your logs show which products AI systems read most, even when no click follows. Our ChatGPT shopping guide lists which bots to allow.

8. Measure AI visibility next to rankings

Track two sets of numbers. For Google, keep rankings, clicks, and conversions per page type. For AI, run a fixed set of buyer prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode every month, record whether you are named and which page is cited, and track AI referral traffic in GA4.

Connect both to pipeline. In B2B, the visit that matters may be the third one, by a different person from the same company, weeks later. Ask new leads where they first heard of you, and add “AI assistant” as an option. Our guide to tracking brand mentions in LLMs shows a repeatable method.

How long B2B SEO takes

Most SEO work for B2B sites shows first results in three to six months, and catalog-wide changes take longer. Technical fixes and opening the catalog can lift visibility within weeks of being crawled. Content and mentions build over six to twelve months. AI assistants update at different speeds, so prompt results can move faster or slower than Google rankings.

Plan the work in that order. Fix what blocks crawling first, then improve product pages, then add answers and mentions. Each step makes the next one count for more.

FAQ about B2B SEO

Is SEO still worth it for B2B companies in 2027?

Yes. Google still sends a large share of B2B research traffic, and the pages that rank in Google are also the pages AI assistants read and cite. What has changed is the measure of success: fewer clicks per search, but better informed visitors, and a growing share of discovery inside AI answers that SEO work also influences.

What is the difference between B2B SEO and B2C SEO?

B2B SEO targets lower-volume, higher-value searches such as part numbers, specs, and applications, made by buying groups with long decision cycles. B2C SEO targets higher-volume product and category terms from individual shoppers. B2B success is measured in qualified leads, quotes, and reorders, while B2C is usually measured in revenue per visit.

What is AEO or GEO, and does a B2B company need it?

AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) mean getting your company named and cited in AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. B2B companies need it because buyers now form vendor shortlists with AI. Most of the work overlaps with good SEO: clear product data, direct answers, and trusted mentions.

Should B2B companies make their product catalog public?

In most cases, yes. Make product names, specs, compatibility, and documents public so search engines and AI assistants can read them, and keep customer-specific prices and ordering behind the login. A hidden catalog cannot rank in Google or be recommended by AI, so gated companies lose buyers at the research stage.

How do I know if ChatGPT recommends my company?

Ask it the questions your buyers ask. Build a list of 20 to 50 real buyer prompts, run them each month in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode, and record which suppliers are named and which pages are cited. Track AI referral traffic in GA4 and ask new leads whether they found you through an AI assistant.

What is the most important SEO task for manufacturers?

For most manufacturers, the most important task is putting complete product data on public, crawlable pages. Specs, compatibility, certifications, and documents are what buyers search for and what AI assistants quote. Without them, content and link building have little to point to.

B2B SEO in 2027 starts with your product data

B2B SEO in 2027 means ranking for the searches that still click through and being named in the AI answers where buyers now build their shortlists. Both run on the same foundation: an open, complete catalog, product pages that state the facts, answers to real buyer questions, and mentions on sites that AI assistants trust. Start with what blocks crawlers, then build out from there.

Asked ChatGPT about your product category and found your competitors instead? Tell us what you sell and where, and we'll show you where you stand in Google and in AI answers.

The post B2B SEO in 2027: How to Rank on Google and Get Recommended by AI appeared first on scandiweb.

Ask ChatGPT for the best rattan chair under €300 and it answers with a row of product cards: photos, prices, ratings and a link to buy. Most of the stores in that row never applied for anything, and some stores that would sell the perfect chair are missing because their IT team blocked a bot two years ago. Both facts point to the same thing: ChatGPT shopping works from the data it can reach, and you decide most of that data.

This guide covers how ChatGPT chooses products, the routes into it for Shopify, Magento and other platforms, what Google AI Mode needs, and which AI crawlers to allow or block.

What is ChatGPT shopping?

ChatGPT shopping is the set of features that show product results inside ChatGPT when someone asks for buying advice: product cards with images, prices, reviews and links to buy, plus a guided shopping research mode for bigger purchases. OpenAI says the results are chosen independently and are not ads. Since March 2026, most purchases finish on the merchant’s own website.

The features arrived in stages. Product results appeared in ChatGPT search in 2025, and shopping research, which asks follow-up questions and builds a buyer’s guide, launched in November 2025. In September 2025, OpenAI added Instant Checkout, so shoppers could pay without leaving the chat. That part was scaled back in March 2026. Shoppers researched in ChatGPT and then preferred to buy on the retailer’s site, so checkout moved back to merchant websites and merchant apps inside ChatGPT. Our earlier guide to agentic commerce explains how Instant Checkout worked.

For a store, this changes the job. ChatGPT is now mainly a discovery and referral channel, much like a search engine with a product carousel, and the work is getting your products into that carousel with accurate data.

How ChatGPT chooses which products and stores to show

ChatGPT picks products by how well they match the question and what it knows about the shopper, then ranks the stores that sell each product. OpenAI’s help pages name availability, price, quality and whether the store makes or mainly sells the item as factors. The data comes from crawled web pages, third-party data providers and product feeds that merchants send directly.

Four details in OpenAI’s documentation matter for merchants:

• Product choice and store choice are separate steps. A product can appear while your store is missing from its list of sellers, so check both.
• Price and availability carry weight. When several stores sell the same item, the cheapest in-stock offer can get a “Best price” label.
• Data can lag. OpenAI warns that prices and shipping details shown in ChatGPT may be out of date, which is why a frequently refreshed feed beats a page that gets crawled now and then.
• Brands get credit for making the product. Whether you make or primarily sell the item is a ranking factor, which helps D2C brands against resellers.

How to get listed in ChatGPT shopping

There are three ways to get listed in ChatGPT shopping. Let OpenAI’s search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, read your product pages. Sell on Shopify, which sends your catalog to ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog. Or apply at chatgpt.com/merchants to send a product feed directly, which OpenAI currently opens to approved partners. Paid product ads from a feed are a fourth, separate option.

Shopify stores

Shopify sends merchants’ products to ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog, and OpenAI’s help pages say individual merchants don’t need to do anything extra. Since March 2026, this runs as Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts channel, which is switched on by default and managed in the Shopify admin. Shoppers who tap a product finish the purchase on your own storefront, and the orders appear in Shopify like any other sales channel.

Being in the catalog is only the starting point. Your product titles, descriptions, variants and images are what ChatGPT reads, so the Shopify SEO checklist applies here too.

Magento, Adobe Commerce and other platforms

Magento and Adobe Commerce have no built-in ChatGPT channel. Stores on these platforms get in through crawling, and the larger ones through a direct feed once OpenAI approves them. A feed usually comes from a feed management tool or a custom export that maps your catalog to OpenAI’s schema, the same way you’d build a Google Shopping feed. If you’d rather not build that mapping yourself, it’s part of our product feed management work.

What goes in a ChatGPT product feed

OpenAI’s commerce documentation sets out how a direct feed works:

• Delivery: a full catalog snapshot pushed by SFTP at least once a day, with API updates during the day for price and stock changes
• Formats: Parquet preferred, with compressed JSONL, CSV and TSV also accepted, up to about 500,000 items per file
• Content: product ID, title, factual description, product URL, price, availability, images, barcodes such as GTINs, categories and seller details
• Variants: one row per size or color, with variant options filled in, so each purchasable item has its own price and stock
• Removal: a product that drops out of the feed stays visible for up to 14 days, so set it as ineligible for search if it must disappear sooner
• Tracking: add a parameter such as utm_medium=feed to product URLs so feed clicks show up separately in analytics

OpenAI also says required fields make prices and availability display correctly, while extras such as rich media and reviews improve ranking. Start with a sample of about 100 products, fix the validation errors, then send the full catalog.

How products get into Google AI Mode shopping

Google AI Mode shows products from the same sources as Google Shopping: pages Google can crawl and index, and product data in Google Merchant Center. Google says there are no extra requirements and no special markup for AI Mode. Keep Merchant Center accurate, make your structured data match the page, and keep Googlebot unblocked.

Google’s own guidance on AI features is blunt about it: a page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet, and you don’t need new files, AI text files or special schema. Good product structured data still helps, as long as it matches what the page shows.

Checkout is where Google is moving faster than OpenAI. In January 2026, Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), built with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, so shoppers can buy in AI Mode and Gemini while the retailer stays the merchant of record. In May 2026, Google announced a Universal Cart with Google Pay checkout, plans to bring UCP checkout to Canada and Australia and later the UK, and an AI performance report in Merchant Center that shows how your brand appears on AI surfaces.

Should you block AI crawlers?

Block AI crawlers for training if you want to, and keep every search crawler allowed. Blocking GPTBot stops OpenAI from training on your pages without affecting ChatGPT shopping. Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes your pages from ChatGPT search answers, and blocking Googlebot removes you from Google Search, AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google-Extended only controls Gemini training and grounding, and Search ignores it.

For most stores, the right robots.txt allows the search crawlers and blocks training if you want to. A minimal version looks like this:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

OpenAI says changes take about 24 hours to apply to search results. Our Magento robots.txt guide shows where to edit the file in the Magento admin and how to test it.

Check your CDN before your robots.txt

Plenty of stores that never touched robots.txt still block AI crawlers at the CDN. Since 15 September 2026, Cloudflare blocks training and agent bots by default on new domains with ads, while search bots stay allowed. It also now treats Googlebot, Bingbot and Applebot as mixed search-and-training crawlers, so a blunt “block AI training” setting can block them too. Cloudflare’s newer “Disallow AI Training” option keeps search crawling while blocking training. Check the bot settings in your CDN and firewall, then confirm in your server logs that OAI-SearchBot gets a 200 response on product pages.

How to optimize for ChatGPT shopping

Once the data can reach ChatGPT, the same things that make a product page convert also make it easier to recommend:

1. Keep price and stock identical everywhere. The feed, the product page and the structured data should show the same price and availability.
2. Write descriptions that answer buying questions. Materials, dimensions, compatibility, who it suits and how it differs from similar products. The same answers power an AI shopping assistant on your own store.
3. Use real identifiers. GTINs and brand names let ChatGPT match your offer to the right product.
4. Show reviews on the page. Ratings and review counts appear on product cards, and OpenAI lists reviews among the signals that improve ranking.
5. Publish clear shipping and returns pages. Shoppers ask about delivery and returns, and ChatGPT can only answer from what it can read.
6. Earn mentions on other sites. Reviews, comparisons and press mentions shape which brands ChatGPT trusts for a category.

This works for smaller brands too. For Kouboo, a boutique home decor brand, we optimized product and category pages and secured outside citations. The brand reached 53% visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity for high-intent prompts and appeared in the top three recommendations next to Amazon and Wayfair.

How to measure AI shopping traffic

ChatGPT referrals show up in GA4 as visits from chatgpt.com, and ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to most outbound links. Build a GA4 exploration or channel group for AI referrals, so ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot traffic doesn’t disappear into “Referral”, and add utm_medium=feed to feed URLs to separate feed clicks from organic mentions. Before you trust conversion numbers from this traffic, check that your consent setup records purchases correctly.

On the Google side, Merchant Center’s new AI performance report shows how your brand appears on AI surfaces, rolling out in the US and four other markets. For brand mentions across assistants, a monitoring tool such as our AnswerRank leaderboard tracks how often AI answers recommend you.

Frequently asked questions about ChatGPT shopping

Is ChatGPT shopping free for merchants?

Yes. Appearing in ChatGPT’s product results costs nothing, whether ChatGPT finds your products by crawling, through Shopify Catalog or through a direct feed. OpenAI says these results are not ads. Paid placement is separate: product feed ads in OpenAI’s Ads Manager, currently in open beta.

Can shoppers still buy directly in ChatGPT?

Mostly not inside the chat itself. OpenAI scaled back Instant Checkout in March 2026, and purchases now finish on the merchant’s website or in a merchant’s own app inside ChatGPT. Shopify stores send shoppers to their own checkout through an in-app browser.

Are ChatGPT product results ads?

No. OpenAI says product results are chosen independently and are not ads or influenced by its partnerships. Separate, labeled ads can appear for advertisers who run campaigns in OpenAI’s Ads Manager.

Does blocking GPTBot remove my products from ChatGPT?

No. GPTBot only collects content for model training. ChatGPT search and shopping use OAI-SearchBot, so you can block GPTBot and still appear, as long as OAI-SearchBot is allowed in robots.txt and in your CDN.

Do I need an llms.txt file?

No. OpenAI’s merchant documentation doesn’t ask for one, and Google says you don’t need AI text files to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Spend the time on crawler access, product data and feed quality instead.

How long does it take for products to appear in ChatGPT?

It depends on the route. Robots.txt changes reach ChatGPT search in about 24 hours, but pages still need to be crawled. Shopify catalog products sync automatically. A direct feed needs OpenAI’s approval first, then updates with every daily snapshot.

Get your products in front of AI shoppers

ChatGPT shopping rewards stores whose product data is reachable, consistent and current, and the same work gets you into Google AI Mode. Allow the search crawlers, check the CDN, keep the feed and the product pages in sync, and measure the traffic separately. As an OpenAI Select Partner, we help stores do all of this as part of AI search optimization.

Asked ChatGPT about your category and found your competitors instead? Tell us what it recommended, and we'll show you what's keeping your products out.

The post ChatGPT Shopping and Google AI Mode: How to Get Your Products Listed appeared first on scandiweb.

Most of the SEO advice you read applies to any website: write good content, earn links, fix your titles. That advice is not wrong, but it quietly assumes a platform that behaves itself. Magento (Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source), does not. It generates URLs you never asked for, indexes filter combinations by the thousand, and arrives with defaults that can bury your real pages under crawl waste. A generalist agency that has only ever optimized WordPress blogs will treat the symptoms and miss the cause.

Below, we lay out the criteria that separate a Magento SEO company from a marketing firm that happens to have a Magento client, then walk through how to vet candidates on the work that protects your rankings through an upgrade or a replatform.

Why Magento SEO is a specialist discipline, not a generalist add-on

Organic search is not a side channel for a Magento store. By 2025, organic search accounted for roughly 43–53% of eCommerce website traffic, depending on the source, making it the single largest acquisition channel for most retailers (SEOInc, 2025). When that channel runs on a platform with platform-specific traps, the traps become a revenue problem.

The clearest example is layered navigation. A single category with 8 filters across 100 products can generate around 4,000 indexable URL combinations (Velsof, 2026). Multiply that across a catalog and Google ends up crawling five to ten times more URLs than you have products. Crawl budget is spent on color-and-size permutations rather than the pages you want ranked, and thin near-duplicate pages dilute the authority of the originals.

A Magento specialist knows this is the first place to look. A generalist often does not, because the WordPress and Shopify stores they cut their teeth on never produced the problem at this scale.

What does a Magento SEO company actually do differently?

A Magento SEO company works at the platform layer: it controls how Magento generates URLs, what gets indexed, how canonicals resolve, and how the catalog renders for speed. A generalist works at the content and link layer and leaves the platform untouched. That difference shows up across a handful of areas that recur on every serious Magento project, and they are the same areas we use as the selection criteria below.

Selection criteria: how to judge a Magento SEO company

Use these five criteria as a scorecard. A strong partner can show concrete work, not just claims, against each one. We have ordered them by how often they decide whether organic revenue grows or quietly leaks away.

1. Magento technical SEO: crawl, index, and faceted navigation control

This is the foundation. Ask exactly how a candidate handles layered navigation, URL parameters, and canonical tags. The right answer is specific: a defined policy for which filter combinations are crawlable, robots rules that match it, canonical tags that resolve multi-category products to one URL, and an XML sitemap that lists only the pages you want indexed.

Weak answers stay abstract. If an agency cannot describe how it would stop a category with thousands of filter permutations from being crawled, it is a content team, not a Magento SEO company. Our breakdown of an SEO-safe robots.txt shows the level of platform detail a specialist works at.

2. Core Web Vitals and performance on a heavy catalog

Magento arrives feature-rich and heavy. Large JavaScript payloads, unoptimized images, and full-page-cache misconfigurations routinely push Largest Contentful Paint past the 2.5-second threshold and Interaction to Next Paint past 200 milliseconds. On a heavy catalog, those numbers do not fix themselves.

The business case is direct. Rakuten increased conversions by 33% and revenue per visitor by 53% after improving all three Core Web Vitals (web.dev case study). A Magento SEO company should treat performance as an SEO and conversion lever together, and work alongside developers on caching, image delivery, and front-end strategy, including modern stacks like Hyvä.

3. Migration and redirect SEO that survives a replatform

The fastest way to lose years of organic equity is a careless migration or version upgrade. URLs change, redirects get missed, and rankings fall off a cliff. A Magento SEO company mitigates that risk with disciplined 301 redirect mapping and a pre-launch SEO checklist.

Ask for the process. A good partner can describe full URL-to-URL mapping, redirect testing in staging, and post-launch monitoring. Our 301 redirect mapping guide outlines the approach that preserves rankings during a Magento 2 move, and it is a fair benchmark for what a specialist should already do by default.

4. Structured data and AI Overview readiness

Product, breadcrumb, and review schema are no longer optional. They drive rich results and, increasingly, whether your pages are eligible to be cited in AI-generated answers. Google AI Overviews already appear in around 16% of eCommerce searches and have been measured to cut click-through rates from 1.41% to 0.64% on affected queries (The Digital Bloom, 2025).

A Magento SEO company should deliver complete, valid structured data across product and category templates, not a half-filled snippet that throws errors in validation. Ask to see the live schema on a store they manage and run it through a validator yourself.

5. Proven ranking and revenue results

Certifications and tidy decks are table stakes. What separates real specialists is documented outcomes tied to organic search: traffic recovered after a migration, rankings held through an upgrade, and revenue attributable to organic growth. scandiweb has published cases such as a 17% organic traffic gain following a Magento 2 migration, which is the kind of before-and-after evidence you should ask every candidate to produce.

How Magento SEO pricing maps to revenue at stake

Retainers for Magento SEO typically range from roughly 1,500 to 5,000 US dollars per month, with technical audits costing a few thousand dollars up front and larger projects climbing from there. Those numbers only mean something against the revenue they protect, so read a quote as a percentage of the organic revenue at risk, not as a line item to minimize.

Anchor it to a real number. The average return on SEO investment across industries is about 748%, or roughly 22 US dollars back for every dollar spent, with eCommerce specifically near 1,600% over time (FirstPageSage, 2025). On a store doing several million in annual organic-attributed revenue, a 4,000-dollar-a-month specialist who protects that channel through an upgrade is cheap insurance. A 1,200-dollar generalist who lets a botched migration drop you 30% is the expensive option, even though the invoice is smaller.

So the pricing question is really a scope question. Ask each candidate what share of your organic revenue their work touches and how their fee compares to a worst-case ranking loss in your category. A specialist answers in revenue terms. A generalist retreats to deliverables and hours, which is the tell.

Multi-store and multi-language SEO: the Magento trap generalists miss

Magento’s native multi-store and multi-website architecture is one of its biggest commercial strengths and one of its quietest SEO liabilities. A single Magento installation can serve many store views across domains, languages, and regions, and each store view can produce its own URLs for the same underlying products. Done wrong, that means duplicate content competing against itself across markets.

The platform-specific fixes are exact: hreflang annotations so Google serves the right language and regional version, canonical tags that respect store-view boundaries rather than collapsing them, and a sitemap and robots strategy scoped per store. Cross-domain duplication between, say, a .com and a .de view is a common and costly mistake when a generalist treats each domain as an unrelated site.

This is not a niche concern. International sales now account for close to 29% of total eCommerce revenue, and cross-border eCommerce is forecast to continue outpacing domestic growth into 2026 (DHL, 2025). For any brand running multiple store views, the agency you choose must detail a store-view-level SEO model in detail. Ask a candidate to walk you through structuring a three-country Magento store, and the depth of the answer tells you whether they have done it before.

Best Magento SEO companies to evaluate in 2026

The agencies below specialize in Magento and Adobe Commerce SEO. Use the entries as a starting shortlist, then score each against the five criteria above. We have noted who each fits and what to watch for, with the summary table after the entries as your at-a-glance recap.

scandiweb

scandiweb is an eCommerce agency that has worked with Magento since the platform’s early days, and it combines technical SEO with the engineering and conversion optimization needed to act on its findings. It fits mid-market to enterprise brands that want SEO, development, and conversion work under one roof rather than coordinated across three vendors. The core strength is that the recommendations and the code that delivers them live in the same team, because most Magento SEO fixes are platform changes: a redirect map, a caching strategy, a template-level schema rollout.

scandiweb is built for ambitious budgets and complex stores, so the smallest single-store merchants may find the model heavier than they need. If your real question is whether you need an SEO specialist or a development partner first, our roundup of top Magento development companies is a useful companion read, because on Magento, those two decisions usually overlap.

OuterBox

OuterBox is a US-based digital agency with a long track record in eCommerce SEO and paid search. It fits American brands that want full-funnel Adobe Commerce marketing, where organic and paid are planned together rather than bought from separate shops. Its strength is a catalog-scale indexation strategy tied to a wider performance-marketing program, which suits retailers thinking about blended acquisition cost rather than channels in isolation.

Because OuterBox spans the full digital-marketing spectrum, confirm the depth of dedicated Magento technical expertise for your specific account and ask who owns the platform-level work as opposed to the campaign layer. Press for named examples of faceted navigation and migration work, not just traffic charts.

Inchoo

Inchoo is a European agency with a deep Magento engineering heritage that predates many of its competitors. It fits merchants who want SEO led by people who genuinely understand the codebase, particularly where technical fixes and development happen in the same conversation. The strength is developer-led SEO: when the highest-impact work is redirect logic, caching, and template-level structured data, an agency that built Magento stores for years brings platform fluency that content-first shops cannot match.

The watch-out is the size of the dedicated SEO bench relative to a full-service performance agency. Confirm that strategic SEO, content, and reporting get the same attention as the engineering, and clarify how ongoing monitoring is staffed once the technical groundwork is complete.

Meetanshi

Meetanshi is best known as a Magento extension developer and also offers SEO and store optimization services. It fits stores that already lean on Magento extensions and want SEO support from a team fluent in the same technical environment. The strength is genuine product knowledge: because the team builds and maintains modules, it understands how they interact with crawl, indexation, and performance, which can make technical recommendations more grounded than a pure agency might offer.

SEO is one service among many. Confirm you are getting a dedicated SEO strategy; ask for organic outcome data with timeframes, and validate that strategic search work is staffed independently of the product team.

Amasty

Amasty is a major Magento extension vendor whose services arm offers on-page and technical SEO close to the codebase. It fits Open Source stores already running Amasty extensions that want optimization from a team that knows those modules intimately. The strength is proximity to the code: recommendations land faster when the same team understands exactly how the installed extensions generate URLs, schema, and cached output.

A vendor naturally frames problems in terms of its own modules, so confirm the SEO work is platform-agnostic where it needs to be and is judged on organic results. Ask for case evidence outside their own extension catalog.

How to choose: a short decision framework

Run every candidate through the same four questions. The answers separate specialists from generalists faster than any sales call.

1. Show me your faceted navigation policy. A specialist describes a concrete crawl-and-index rule set. A generalist talks about meta titles.
2. Walk me through your last migration. Look for redirect mapping, staging tests, and post-launch monitoring, not just a launch date.
3. Show live structured data on a store you run. Then validate it yourself. Errors here are a fast disqualifier.
4. Prove a result. A documented organic traffic or revenue gain, with the timeframe, beats a list of logos.

How long until a Magento SEO company shows results?

Technical fixes such as crawl control, redirects, and Core Web Vitals can show measurable movement within 3 to 4 months. Sustained ranking and revenue growth usually take 6 to 12 months, depending on competition and catalog size.

Do you need a developer as well as an SEO agency?

Often yes, because the highest-impact Magento SEO work is code: redirect rules, caching, template-level schema, and performance tuning. A partner that handles SEO and development together removes the handoffs where fixes stall.

Scope note: SEO partners versus development and platform choices

This guide covers SEO and technical SEO firms for Magento only. Two adjacent decisions deserve their own scope. If you are choosing who builds or rebuilds the store, the development roundup linked above is the right reference. If you are still deciding whether Magento is the right platform at all, our Magento vs Shopify comparison covers the SEO and total cost trade-offs first.

Frequently asked questions

What is Magento SEO?

Magento SEO is search engine optimization for stores running Adobe Commerce or Magento Open Source. It combines standard SEO with platform-specific work: controlling crawl and index bloat from layered navigation, fixing canonicals, tuning Core Web Vitals on a heavy catalog, and protecting rankings through migrations and upgrades.

Why hire a Magento SEO company instead of a generalist agency?

Because Magento creates platform-specific problems a generalist rarely encounters, such as thousands of filtered URLs from faceted navigation and full-page cache misconfigurations that wreck performance. A specialist knows where to look and can fix the platform, not just the content around it.

How much do Magento SEO services cost?

It varies by scope. Technical audits commonly run a few thousand dollars, ongoing retainers range from roughly 1,500 to 5,000 US dollars a month, and larger project-based work runs higher. Pricing should map to the revenue at stake, not to a fixed package.

How is Magento SEO different from generic eCommerce SEO?

The strategy layer is similar, but the technical layer is not. Magento’s URL generation, layered navigation, multi-store setup, and caching all behave in ways that demand platform knowledge. Generic eCommerce SEO advice usually skips these because it assumes a simpler platform.

Does Magento SEO protect rankings during a replatform or upgrade?

It should be the main reason you hire a specialist for one. Disciplined 301 redirect mapping, staging tests, and post-launch monitoring are what keep organic traffic and rankings intact when URLs change. Skipping this is the most common way stores lose years of organic equity.

What results should a Magento SEO company be able to prove?

Documented organic outcomes with timeframes: traffic recovered after a migration, rankings held through an upgrade, or revenue growth attributable to organic search. Logos and certifications are table stakes, not evidence.

Can the same partner handle both SEO and Magento development?

Yes, and on Magento it is often the better setup. Because most high-impact fixes are code changes, a partner that handles SEO and development together avoids the handoffs where recommendations get stuck in a backlog.

Want rankings that survive a replatform and an upgrade? Have our specialists review your Magento SEO and pressure-test it against the criteria above.

The post Best Magento SEO Companies: How to Choose a Specialist appeared first on scandiweb.

“Sales volume was so high that our US team considered increasing shipping prices to slow orders down.”

Jean-Christophe Jouve
Global Finance Director at FELCO

For over 75 years, FELCO built a product so good that professionals worldwide wouldn’t use anything else. Swiss-made pruning tools, trusted by arborists and master gardeners who knew exactly what they were buying and why.

But by 2025, that professional loyalty, as valuable as it was, had become a ceiling. A much larger, underserved home gardening market was right there, and FELCO’s digital presence wasn’t speaking to it.

What followed was a six-month transformation in collaboration with scandiweb, bringing FELCO’s digital strategy from fragmented channel execution to a fully integrated DTC growth engine that delivered CHF 3.9M in revenue, +108% YoY growth, and the strongest Black Friday sale in FELCO’s digital history.

About FELCO

Founded in Switzerland, FELCO is globally recognized for manufacturing premium pruning and cutting tools used by professionals worldwide – the brand has long been synonymous with precision engineering and exceptional craftsmanship.

As DTC commerce became a growing strategic priority, FELCO identified an opportunity to expand beyond its professional base and reach the much larger home gardening segment, without compromising the premium positioning that defined the brand. At the same time, international expansion meant multiple markets and multiple digital channels, all running independently of each other.

Project goals

Main objectives at the start of our collaboration in July 2025 were to:

• Double DTC revenue YoY
• Achieve ROAS consistently above 4.0 across paid media
• Expand the customer base beyond professional buyers
• Build centralized performance visibility across markets
• Create a repeatable, scalable DTC operating model
• Execute the campaign following a tight timeline, with Black Friday only 4 months away.

Problem

Each channel – paid media, SEO, email, analytics, and CX – operated and reported independently. There was no unified picture of how a customer moved throughout touchpoints, where they dropped off, or what was actually driving revenue.

The issues showed up as:

• No cross-channel attribution or unified performance model
• Paid media profitability invisible by market, segment, and campaign type
• SEO disconnected from lifecycle strategy and conversion flows
• Limited email list segmentation and no meaningful automation
• GA4 and dataLayer inconsistencies
• Customer journey gaps at onboarding and post-purchase
• UX and messaging for professionals, creating friction for casual users.

Before and after: FELCO’s digital transformation

Solution

Rather than optimizing channels independently, scandiweb established a centralized growth operating model and launched a fully integrated marketing campaign. We took end-to-end responsibility for strategy, prioritization, and execution across paid media, SEO, AEO, email, analytics, CX, CRO, creative production, and development. Everything was oriented around the same funnel, audiences, and commercial targets.

Audience strategy and target personas

FELCO was beloved by professionals, but growth required repositioning the brand to resonate with the much larger, underserved home gardener audience. We treated this as a target audience expansion. Professionals remained a core audience, while we tried to make FELCO legible, appealing, and accessible to people who had never thought of themselves as the kind of person who uses professional pruning tools, and who would, once introduced correctly, become exactly that.

The two customer personas we built the strategy around:

• The Passionate Home Gardener – someone who values quality and durability, cares deeply about sustainability, and is genuinely invested in their garden; they can be overwhelmed by choice, so they need confidence and guidance.
• The Aspirational Hobbyist – drawn more by aesthetics and lifestyle than precision; they discover through social media and respond to seasonal projects, educational content, beautiful imagery, and the idea that the right tool is also the right statement.

Full-funnel paid media

We rebuilt the paid media architecture around intent and lifecycle stage:

• Upper-funnel creative introduced FELCO to home gardeners using emotional storytelling, like the satisfaction of a clean cut and pride of a well-kept garden
• Mid-funnel campaigns targeted active researchers with product-specific content
• Lower-funnel retargeting used dynamic creative adapted to browsing behavior.

Microsoft Ads, Pinterest, and TikTok were integrated as new channels into the acquisition strategy:

• TikTok for emotional resonance with younger home gardeners
• Pinterest for aspirational lifestyle content tied to seasonal moments
• Microsoft for capturing high-intent searches at lower cost. 

AI-powered creative workflow enabled over 300 ads deployed during BFCM.

SEO and AEO strategy

A full technical SEO and AEO audit addressed immediate gaps and longer-term search behavior, helping FELCO capture non-branded, high-intent searches from home gardeners and hobbyists:

• Technical SEO cleanup and crawl optimization
• Category tree expansion and navigation restructuring
• PLP and PDP content optimization
• Localized SEO for key European markets.

Alongside traditional SEO, we invested significant effort in answer engine optimization. A growing share of queries, particularly in product research and “how to choose” questions, is now answered directly by AI-powered engines, often without the user ever clicking through to a website. For a brand like FELCO, where purchase decisions frequently start with questions (what’s the best pruning tool for roses, do I need professional tools for home use, and similar), visibility in AI-generated answers is becoming as important as ranking on page one.

We restructured content so that it could be surfaced and cited by AI answer engines: rewriting key pages to lead with direct, concise answers to the questions FELCO’s target audiences were asking, building supporting educational content to establish topical authority, and ensuring that structured data and page architecture made it easy for AI systems to extract and attribute FELCO’s content accurately. 

Analytics and performance intelligence

The analytics infrastructure rebuild included GA4 implementation, dataLayer architecture, consent management, and reporting dashboards to support reliable, revenue-aligned decision-making.

For the first time, FELCO has:

• Cohort-level analysis by customer segment
• Cross-channel attribution across paid, SEO, and email
• Funnel drop-off diagnostics by step and audience
• Retention and repeat purchase tracking
• Campaign-level performance tied to contribution margin.

Lifecycle and retention marketing

We built a structured lifecycle engine and designed automated flows across the full customer journey: welcome and onboarding, product education, cart recovery, post-purchase engagement, cross-sell sequences, and seasonal gifting campaigns. Weekly newsletters were integrated into the broader marketing calendar, allowing CRM activity to reinforce paid media and seasonal pushes. 

Customer experience transformation

After the CX audit identified friction points specific to non-professional users, such as navigation and discovery that assumed product knowledge, and incomplete post-purchase experiences, we introduced, through UX redesign:

• Clearer product segmentation for professional vs. home gardener
• Simplified navigation and category structure
• Stronger tool selection guidance and product education
• Improved mobile usability
• Better integration of brand messaging throughout the journey.

Flagship campaign – BFCM 2025: professional-grade tools made accessible for every home gardener

Black Friday became the clearest expression of what this integrated model could do. We ran as a single coordinated experience throughout channels.

Paid media drove VIP early-access sign-ups ahead of the public launch, with intent-driven search and social campaigns leading on FELCO’s craftsmanship and seasonal offers.

Landing pages were rebuilt to lead with storytelling and simplify product selection for non-professional visitors – benefits first, technical specifications available but never required.

Email and SMS delivered early access to VIP members, then segmented flows throughout the sale window: educational content, offer reminders, abandoned cart, and checkout nudges, all coordinated with the paid calendar.

Retargeting showed dynamic product ads with messaging adapted to browsing behavior and funnel stage.

Post-purchase flows kept the conversation going after checkout with onboarding emails, usage tips, cross-sell recommendations, and a gifting push to satisfied BFCM buyers.

Results

2025 DTC performance

• +107.87% YoY revenue
• 4–5 ROAS consistently
• +208% traffic

What started as fragmented digital activity became a repeatable DTC growth system. This foundation helped us double DTC revenue year over year while expanding into new markets.

Jean-Christophe Jouve
Global Finance Director at FELCO

July–November (campaign window)

• +207% YoY DTC revenue, the strongest July–November period in FELCO’s digital history

November–December (peak season) YoY

• +167.2% revenue
• +154.4% transactions
• +5.0% AOV – given it was the most discount-driven week in the retail calendar, the campaign grew volume without requiring margin destruction to do it
• -76.7% add-to-cart drop-off

Black Friday week (24 Nov–1 Dec) YoY

• +292.1% revenue
• +828.6% PPC revenue
• +334.4% SEO revenue

The campaign delivered strong results. But the more interesting thing about this campaign is what it was actually doing. FELCO is a 75-year-old precision tool brand with deep credibility in a professional niche. We had to expand the definition of who FELCO is for without losing what made the brand worth expanding.

It required brand repositioning and performance marketing to align and meet a November deadline. The creatives had to work emotionally for a new audience while remaining honest about what FELCO is, and all the campaign activities had to scale a new segment without cannibalizing the professional base. The results are evidence that it worked. Alongside those numbers is the system that produced them: a fully integrated growth model that FELCO now owns.

Thinking about your DTC growth? If you are currently launching into a new segment or market, or trying to connect fragmented digital channels into something that performs – we’ve done it, and we can help. Get in touch with the scandiweb Integrated Growth team today.

The post Case Study: Doubling DTC Revenue for a 75-Year-Old Swiss Tool Brand in 6 Months appeared first on scandiweb.

Acquiring a new customer costs five to 25 times more than keeping one you already have, depending on the industry (Bain & Company). Yet most eCommerce budgets still pour the majority of spend into the top of the funnel, chasing first purchases while the customers who already converted quietly lapse.

Acquisition and retention together make up the fourth pillar of eCommerce. Get one without the other and the model leaks: acquisition without retention is a bucket with a hole in it, retention without acquisition is a slowly shrinking base. This guide covers both, the math that decides how to split the budget between them, and the channels that move each.

Overview

• Acquisition brings in new customers, and retention turns them into repeat buyers. Sustainable growth needs both, in balance.
• The split is a math question, not a preference. CAC, CLV, and the CLV:CAC ratio tell you whether you are over-spending on acquisition or under-investing in keeping customers.
• The highest-return retention work (email and SMS, CRO, AI personalization, a loyalty program) usually costs less per dollar of revenue than buying the next new customer.

What acquisition and retention actually cost

Most acquisition-versus-retention debates skip the only numbers that settle them. Three metrics do:

• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers it won. If you spent $10,000 to acquire 200 customers, your CAC is $50.
• CLV (Customer Lifetime Value): the total profit you expect from a customer across the whole relationship. A rough version is average order value multiplied by purchase frequency multiplied by the average customer lifespan.
• The CLV:CAC ratio: the health check. A ratio around 3:1 is the common benchmark for a sustainable eCommerce model. Closer to 1:1 means you are paying nearly as much to win a customer as they are worth. Much higher than 3:1 often means you are under-investing in growth and could afford to acquire more.

The reason retention earns its budget is in the same numbers. Research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company found that increasing customer retention by just 5% can raise profits by 25% to 95%, because a retained customer buys again without a fresh acquisition cost each time. Every order after the first one improves the CLV side of the ratio without touching the CAC side.

Understanding acquisition in eCommerce

Customer acquisition is about reaching the right audience, the people who are your target market and ready to buy, through the channels that have the most impact: organic search, paid ads, and social. A few strategies carry most of the weight.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is the foundation for organic, high-intent traffic, the people actively searching for your products or solutions. The caveat that matters: write for humans, not crawlers. Content built only for algorithms reads as such and fails to convert. Effective SEO pairs keyword targeting and technical fixes with content that actually answers the reader. Learn how to do SEO for your eCommerce site.

Paid search and social advertising

Paid ads are the fast, measurable route to visibility across search and social. The skill is in targeting: audience demographics, behavior, and intent decide placement. Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook, and TikTok each reward content tuned to their own audience. See how paid search and social ads can work for you.

Emerging channels: TikTok and social commerce

Younger, highly engaged audiences are reachable through social commerce. TikTok Shop, user-generated content, and influencer partnerships extend reach and let brands meet people on platforms they already use. See TikTok for eCommerce brands.

Discover more from our success stories

• Case Study: Competitive Automotive SEO in Qatari Market
• PPC Case Study: +30% Conversions with Margin Tracking
• Macron Sees 539% Increase in SERP Visibility After Content Optimization

Retention: keeping customers engaged and loyal

Acquisition introduces customers, and retention is where sustainable growth actually happens. Retention turns one-time buyers into repeat customers, and repeat customers into advocates. A few channels do most of the work.

Email and SMS marketing

Email and SMS keep customers engaged with targeted messages, exclusive offers, and timely reminders. A well-built email strategy, combined with automation, reaches the right customer at the right moment with product updates, sales, or recommendations based on past purchases, and drives repeat orders. See how email and SMS marketing help retention.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

CRO serves retention as much as acquisition. A smooth, low-friction experience, from product discovery to checkout, is a reason customers come back. By analyzing behavior and testing design, CRO keeps the journey easy and the customer returning. Explore CRO services that improve UX and conversion.

AI marketing automation

AI has changed personalized engagement. Data-driven automation predicts behavior and personalizes at scale, so every touchpoint stays relevant. AI can recommend products from browsing history, adjust messaging by engagement, or trigger re-engagement emails after a quiet period, the kind of personalization that drives sales and makes customers feel recognized. See the impact of AI marketing automation on loyalty.

Learn more about retention strategies from our guides

• Strategies for Maximizing Engagement and Loyalty
• 20+ Great Customer Loyalty Program Examples by Industry
• Your Guide to Setting Up Loyalty Programs

Performance marketing that ties acquisition and retention together

A joined-up performance marketing approach uses data and multichannel coordination to drive engagement, conversions, and loyalty at once. Tools like product feed management and marketplace support extend reach and keep the brand consistent across platforms.

Marketplace and Amazon management

Marketplaces like Amazon reach new customers, but they punish poor management. Optimized listings, careful ad spend, and close performance monitoring are what separate a profitable marketplace presence from a leaky one. scandiweb’s marketplace management helps you raise visibility, win new customers, and keep existing ones. Learn more about eCommerce marketplaces.

Product feed management and ad creative

Accurate product feeds are the backbone of advertising across platforms. Feed management keeps inventory displayed correctly on channels like Google Shopping and social ads, and platform-specific ad creative grabs attention. Well-managed feeds plus engaging visuals lift click-through and conversion rates. Find out more about product feed management.

Social media management and social commerce

Social commerce is rising, and Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are sales channels now, not just brand showcases. A coherent social media strategy raises awareness and interaction, while user-generated content and influencer marketing build the trust that turns followers into customers. Explore scandiweb’s social media management.

By coordinating these across the journey, you meet customers at multiple touchpoints and adapt to their habits, which lifts immediate sales and builds the foundation for repeat business.

Hack your marketing strategy with these reads

• Digital Marketing and Traffic Acquisition Strategy in Apparel and Fashion
• Case Studies: SEO Support for Beauty Brands
• Email Marketing Best Practices for Revenue Growth

Frequently asked questions

Is it cheaper to acquire or retain customers?

Retaining is almost always cheaper. Acquiring a new customer costs five to 25 times more than keeping an existing one, depending on the industry (Bain & Company). Retained customers also buy more over time, so the same revenue costs less to earn.

What are the 3 R’s of customer retention?

The three R’s are commonly given as Retention (keeping existing customers), Related sales (cross-sell and upsell to them), and Referrals (existing customers bringing new ones). Together they describe how a loyal customer base compounds in value beyond the first purchase.

What is a good CLV to CAC ratio for eCommerce?

A CLV:CAC ratio around 3:1 is the common benchmark for a healthy eCommerce business. Near 1:1 means acquisition costs are eating your margin. Well above 3:1 can signal you are under-investing in growth and could afford to acquire more aggressively.

What is the difference between customer acquisition and retention?

Acquisition is winning new customers through channels like SEO, paid ads, and social. Retention is keeping the customers you already have and getting them to buy again through email, CRO, personalization, and loyalty programs. Acquisition grows the base, and retention grows its value.

How do you balance acquisition and retention spend?

Use the CLV:CAC ratio. If it is near 1:1, shift budget toward retention until repeat revenue improves the ratio. If it is comfortably above 3:1, you have room to invest more in acquisition. The right split is the one that keeps the ratio healthy while the base grows.

Why does a 5% increase in retention matter so much?

Because retained customers buy again without a new acquisition cost each time. Research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company found a 5% lift in retention can raise profits by 25% to 95%, since the extra orders improve lifetime value without adding to acquisition spend.

Most growth problems are really a balance problem: too much spent winning customers, too little spent keeping them. If your funnel is leaking faster than you can fill it, tell us about your funnel and our Growth Team will help you rebalance it.

Quickly jump to the other pillars of eCommerce here

The post Customer Acquisition and Retention in eCommerce appeared first on scandiweb.

Most migration checklists treat 301 redirects as a final box to tick once the new store is built. That order is backwards, and it is why so many Magento replatforms quietly bleed traffic. A study of 892 site migrations by Search Engine Land found that around half lost organic traffic, only about one in ten improved their rankings, and recovery took an average of roughly 17 months, with 17% of sites never fully recovering. Missing or misconfigured 301 redirects are the single biggest reason. Map the redirects first, and the new store launches with its rankings intact instead of fighting to win them back.

This guide walks through how to build a Magento 301 redirect map, which redirect level to use, and how to test it so a Magento 2 migration does not cost you the traffic you already have.

Overview

• A 301 redirect permanently forwards an old URL to a new one and passes most of the old page’s link equity to the destination, which is what keeps rankings alive through a URL change.
• The minimum viable map covers every URL that earns organic traffic and every URL with valuable backlinks. Everything else is a bonus, not a prerequisite for go-live.
• Magento can auto-generate redirects on URL key changes, but sitewide migrations need a server-level rule set plus a manually verified spreadsheet of old URL to new URL pairs, tested before and after launch.

What is a 301 redirect?

A 301 redirect is a server response that permanently forwards both users and search engine crawlers from an old URL to a new one. The “permanent” signal tells search engines the original page is gone for good and that its accumulated ranking value should pass to the destination URL. Google confirms it forwards PageRank through 301 redirects, so a clean redirect preserves most of a page’s earned authority.

The catch is relevance and path length. As reported by Search Engine Journal citing guidance from Google’s John Mueller and Gary Illyes, redirect chains lose more equity than a single hop, and a redirect that points to an irrelevant destination can be treated as a soft 404, transferring little or nothing. The lesson for Magento mapping is to redirect each old URL to its closest real match in one step, not to dump everything onto the homepage.

Why do 301 redirects matter for an eCommerce migration?

301 redirects matter because they are how a store carries its organic traffic, backlink value, and existing customer paths across to new URLs. Skip them and old pages return 404 errors, drop out of search results, and the new pages start from zero. On an eCommerce store with thousands of indexed product and category URLs, that gap shows up as lost revenue within days.

Think of it like moving house without filing a change of address. The mail still goes to the old place, including the things that matter, and you only notice what you missed once it is too late. URLs behave the same way. When the content moves but no redirect is in place, every channel that points at the old address breaks at once:

• Organic traffic. 301 redirects pass the value of backlinks to the destination URL. Industry analyses put the share of equity carried through a clean 301 in the 90 to 95% range. Without redirects, old pages return 404s, fall out of the index, and the new URLs, even with identical content, can take many months to climb back.
• Paid traffic. Ad destination URLs and email links go stale the moment the URL structure changes. A newsletter sent on Monday with old product links will drop subscribers on a 404 page by Wednesday if the redirects are not live.
• Referral traffic. Links in social posts, press coverage, partner sites, and forums all point at the old addresses and cannot be edited after the fact.
• Direct traffic. Bookmarks and browser history send returning customers, often your most valuable cohort, straight to a missing page.

scandiweb has delivered Magento and Adobe Commerce migrations across more than 2,100 eCommerce projects since 2003, and the pattern is consistent. The migrations that protect rankings are the ones where redirect mapping starts during planning, not the week before go-live. We have also seen the opposite: a Magento 2 migration launched without a redirect map, where organic traffic fell across every channel at launch and 404 errors spiked for the visitors who did arrive, dragging the conversion rate down with it.

When do you need to think about 301 redirect mapping?

You need redirect mapping any time URLs change. If a single indexable URL is moving, evaluate whether a 301 belongs in place. The common triggers on a Magento store are:

1. Migration to a new platform. Magento 1 to Magento 2, Shopify to Magento, or any replatform that regenerates URLs. The Magento 2 version upgrade process can also shift URL keys, so mapping applies to major upgrades as well, not only platform switches. If you are still weighing the platform decision itself, the Magento vs Shopify comparison covers the trade-offs.
2. Domain or structure change. example.de to example.com, a subdomain or subdirectory move, or any change to how paths are built.
3. Menu or site structure updates. Merging categories, renaming sections, or flattening a deep hierarchy.
4. HTTP to HTTPS migration. Every old HTTP URL needs a redirect to its HTTPS equivalent.

One rule cuts a lot of risk: where you can, preserve the existing URLs, at least for top-performing pages. The fewer URLs that change, the fewer redirects you have to get right. For the full scope of what changes during a platform move, the Magento 2 migration guide sets the wider context. Merchants still on Magento 1 have an added reason to move, since an unpatched store cannot pass a clean assessment under current PCI compliance rules, and that migration is exactly when redirect mapping becomes non-negotiable. If you are scoping the move itself, our Magento migration services fold redirect mapping into the project plan rather than leaving it to the final week.

Magento level versus server level redirects

There are three places a redirect can live, and choosing the right one for the job decides how reliable and maintainable the map will be:

1. Magento admin redirects set inside the URL rewrites tool.
2. Server level redirects in Nginx or Apache.
3. Client side redirects handled in the browser.

Magento admin level redirects

When to use them. Redirecting one or a few pages within the same domain, for example merging two categories and forwarding the deleted one to the survivor.

Strengths. Easy to set and edit later with no developer help. Magento also generates redirects automatically when URL keys change. Per Adobe’s documentation on URL rewrites and automatic redirects, the “Create Permanent Redirect for old URL” checkbox is selected by default, so changing a product or category URL key auto-creates a 301.

Limits. By default Magento maps only HTML pages, so a path with a file extension cannot be redirected this way. Loading a large list by hand is slow and error-prone, which invites redirect chains and typos. Adobe also notes that real-time rewrite generation can cause performance issues on large catalogs, so on big stores a developer-imported set or a server rule is usually the safer route.

Server level redirects

When to use them. Domain or subdomain moves, HTTP to HTTPS migrations, and any case where a clear pattern covers a large number of URLs, for example every path ending in .html redirecting to the version without it.

Strengths. The most efficient way to handle extensive, rule-based URL changes in a single regex rather than thousands of individual entries.

Limits. Harder to edit case by case and requires regex knowledge plus developer support.

Client side redirects

These run in the browser through JavaScript or a meta refresh. Avoid them for SEO. As Rankability’s analysis of 301 redirects as a ranking signal notes, crawlers may not follow client-side redirects reliably, which makes server-side 301s the strongly preferred choice for preserving equity.

What is the minimum viable redirect map for a sitewide migration?

When the URL structure changes, every indexable URL should ideally get a 301. The non-negotiable minimum, the set you cannot launch without, is two groups of pages:

• Pages that receive traffic, especially organic. Mapping these protects both SEO and the experience of every visitor arriving from organic, referral, social, bookmarks, or email. A 404 instead of the right page creates friction and lost sales.
• URLs with valuable backlinks. Each backlink from an authoritative source adds trust and ranking value. If that link hits a 404, the value is lost. So even a page with little traffic, and even one not carried over after migration, needs a 301 if it holds strong backlinks.

How do I build a Magento 301 redirect map?

Building a Magento 301 redirect map is a six-step process: understand the scope, gather both URL lists, line them up, match each old URL to its new home, hand the map to developers, and test before and after go-live. Done in this order, it catches the high-value pages first and leaves a verifiable record everyone can check.

1. Understand the scope. Know what is migrating, when, and how. A clear picture of how new URLs are generated makes every later step faster.
2. Gather. Collect the full list of old URLs and the full list of new URLs.
3. Compare. Place both lists side by side in one spreadsheet.
4. Map. Match each old URL to its corresponding new URL.
5. Hand off. Give the finished map to developers to import on the backend.
6. Test before and after go-live. One missed page can directly cost traffic and conversions.

Tools and access you need

Before you start, line up the following:

1. Screaming Frog or another SEO crawler for collecting and verifying URLs.
2. A spreadsheet tool built for volume. Large catalogs produce huge URL lists, and lightweight sheets can slow down or crash. Desktop spreadsheet software handles tens of thousands of rows more comfortably.
3. A backlink tool such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to find URLs worth preserving for their links.
4. Project access. Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console for the live site. Note that GA4 has replaced Universal Analytics, so pull landing-page data from GA4 reports. For deep analysis, server log files help too.

Information to confirm before mapping

To avoid surprises, confirm the scope up front, especially when SEO joins late in a project rather than from the start:

1. Migration type. Does it involve major URL structure changes, such as a domain move from example.eu to example.com?
2. Scope of work. Which domains, subdomains, language versions, and related sites such as landing pages and blogs are in scope.
3. Content changes. Is all content migrating, or are some pages being dropped? Confirm the rough percentage of products actually carrying over, since often not all do.
4. Naming changes. Are category, subcategory, and CMS page names staying the same?
5. URL structure. Watch the start and end of URLs. If old paths ended in .html and new ones do not, every page needs a redirect even when titles and structure otherwise match. The same applies when example.com/gb becomes example.com/en or example.com/gb/. For changes affecting the homepage or the whole site, have developers build the server-side rules.
6. Existing maps. A planning-phase map often already exists, reuse it.
7. Live and staging walkthrough. Understand how they differ. Even when product names are said to be unchanged, cross-check every URL.

Mapping by page type

For eCommerce stores it is easier to map URLs grouped by type: category pages, subcategory pages, product pages, CMS pages, homepage, customer account, and cart or checkout pages. Pull source URLs from a developer database export for products and categories, the XML sitemap, a full site crawl, GA4 top landing pages, and your backlink tool.

Mapping product pages

Stores with thousands of products usually follow one URL convention on both the old and new sites. In Magento 2 that is typically www.example.com/product1, with the product name right after the domain. If the old site used the same pattern, no mapping is needed, though you should still confirm an exact match with spreadsheet formulas.

If the pattern changed:

• Ask developers to export the product URL list from both the old and new sites.
• Normalize the URLs in your spreadsheet, for example using find and replace to strip a /products/ directory so the structures line up.
• Use a lookup formula to check that every new product URL maps to an old one.
• If they all match, list each old product page next to its new URL.

This works when product titles are broadly stable and most products are migrating. When names do not match, look for the rule behind how new URLs are built, or use a shared key. If the SKU or ID sits in the old URL and migrates to the new site, export the SKU alongside the new URLs and map on that. Avoid mapping product pages by hand. If only directories changed, developers can apply one rule across all URLs with no list upload at all.

Mapping category pages

For category URL changes, look again for the overarching rule, such as a directory added or removed. As with products, cross-check how category naming changed, and expect some manual mapping where names diverge.

CMS pages

Most stores have few custom CMS pages, so map them by hand. Crawl the old and new sites, remove the categories and products already mapped, and the URLs left over are your CMS set to redirect.

Homepage and other pages

Map the homepage if it changes, and do the same for blog articles if the store has any.

Top landing pages

GA4 is a strong source of URLs to redirect, including pages that earn traffic but are not internally linked. Top landing pages receiving traffic that are missing from your original map often need their own 301s.

• Select a one to three month window, allowing for seasonality.
• Paid traffic is not the priority here, but organic, referral, social, and direct sources are all worth mapping, with organic as the minimum. GA4 data is not guaranteed perfect, so spot-check that organic numbers look approximately right.
• Export the landing page report to CSV.
• Add it to the same spreadsheet that holds your sitemap data.
• Compare the lists with a lookup formula.
• Crawl any newly found URLs in Screaming Frog to check status, and add a 301 even where there is no 404 yet.
• To crawl a specific set, switch Screaming Frog to List mode and upload or enter the URLs.

URLs with valuable backlinks

Find the pages with backlinks from external sources, ideally more than a few and from higher-authority domains, using your SEO tool:

• Export the list of URLs.
• Compare it against your sitemap and GA4 data.
• Cross-check newly discovered URLs in Screaming Frog.
• Add them to the map.

XML sitemap

A sitemap usually lists the URLs a site considers SEO-valuable, so they belong in the map. On Magento stores built without an extension to generate the XML, the sitemap may be missing CMS pages, the homepage, and more, so do not treat it as complete. It is still a strong way to gather product and category URLs when you cannot pull them straight from the database.

Crawl the sitemap in Screaming Frog to confirm the URLs are real and return 200, not 404 or 301. Before downloading, check sitemap health in Search Console. If Search Console flags major problems such as 404s, the sitemap is likely outdated and cannot be trusted.

How to crawl a sitemap

• Find the sitemap location. It is usually listed in www.example.com/robots.txt, or submitted in Search Console, or visible in the store backend.
• Open Screaming Frog and switch the mode to List.
• Choose Download Sitemap.

• Crawl the sitemap.
• Export the crawl as a CSV.
• Import it into your spreadsheet.
• Keep the useful columns: URL, title, meta description, response code, meta robots.
• Filter out any page whose response code is not 200.

Full website crawl

To catch every internally linked URL, run a full site crawl in Screaming Frog. Watch out for canonicalized pages, noindexed pages, and parameter URLs that do not need redirects because they were never indexed. If a parameter URL has no external links and no incoming traffic, it can stay out of the map.

Identifying redirect chains

Once the URL list is collected, run another crawl and create a redirect chain report in Screaming Frog. Export it to your spreadsheet and find any chain longer than two URLs. In those cases, map both the first and second URL in the chain so each old address reaches the destination in a single hop. This matters because every extra hop in a chain leaks more equity than a clean one-step redirect.

Compare, map, and hand off

With the full old-URL list compiled and the new URLs available, you can crawl the staging site after content migration, then place both in one spreadsheet. Map means matching each old URL to its corresponding new URL. Where there is no exact match, choose the closest relevant alternative, for example mapping a discontinued product to its category page. Then hand developers a single spreadsheet with two columns, old URL and new URL.

How do I test Magento 301 redirects?

Test Magento 301 redirects in two passes, once on staging and once after go-live. On staging, crawl the full redirect list to confirm every rule resolves, and run a redirect chain report to verify each one returns 301 on the first step and 200 on the second. After launch, crawl the same list again to confirm nothing broke in the move to production.

Testing does not end at launch. Plan to monitor for at least the first two to three weeks, because some valuable pages slip through even a careful map:

• Watch the GA4 page reports and the path data for spikes in visits to your 404 page, then trace which old URLs are sending people there and add the missing redirects.
• Use Search Console to track the Pages report under Indexing. A rise in “Not found (404)” or “Page with redirect” issues points to gaps or chains that need fixing.
• Re-crawl periodically in Screaming Frog to confirm redirects still resolve in one hop and have not turned into chains as later URL edits stack up.

For stores that frequently rotate stock and naturally generate 404s over time, it pays to optimize the 404 page itself with bestsellers and related products, so a visitor who does hit a dead end is guided back toward something they were looking for. If the migration also tightened page speed, our Magento performance optimization work keeps those recovered rankings from slipping again on a slow new store.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my Magento 301 redirect not working?

The most common causes are a redirect chain where the first hop points to another redirect rather than a live 200 page, a cached old response, or a rule set at the wrong level. Crawl the URL in Screaming Frog to see the full chain, clear the Magento cache, and confirm whether the redirect should live in the admin, on the server, or as a regex rule.

Does Magento create 301 redirects automatically?

Yes. Per Adobe’s documentation, the “Create Permanent Redirect for old URL” checkbox is selected by default, so changing a product or category URL key auto-generates a 301. On large catalogs, real-time rewrite generation can affect performance, so heavy migrations are better handled with a developer-imported set or server-level rules.

How many backlinks do I lose with a 301 redirect?

A clean, single-hop 301 to a relevant destination passes most of a page’s link equity, with industry analyses citing the 90 to 95% range. You lose value when the redirect points to an irrelevant page, which can be treated as a soft 404, or when it sits inside a multi-step chain that leaks equity at each hop.

Can I redirect URLs programmatically in Magento?

Yes. For large rule-based changes, developers can import a redirect list directly into the database or apply a single server-level regex rule that covers thousands of URLs at once, for example stripping a /products/ directory or a .html suffix. This is faster and less error-prone than entering redirects one by one in the admin.

Should I redirect old URLs to the homepage?

No, not as a default. Redirecting many unrelated old URLs to the homepage can be treated as soft 404s and passes little ranking value. Map each old URL to its closest relevant page, such as a discontinued product to its category, and reserve the homepage only for pages with no sensible match.

How long should I monitor redirects after a migration?

Monitor actively for at least two to three weeks after go-live, watching GA4 404 reports and the Search Console Pages report. Recovery from a poorly mapped migration can take many months, so catching missed redirects in the first weeks is far cheaper than recovering lost rankings later.

Planning a Magento 2 migration and want to keep your rankings intact through the move? Talk to us about how to protect your SEO before the URLs change, not after the traffic drops.

The post Magento 301 Redirect Mapping: How to Keep Rankings appeared first on scandiweb.

In 2024, 58.5% of U.S. searches and 59.7% of E.U. searches ended without a single click, according to SparkToro’s 2024 zero-click study. For most queries, Google now answers the question on the results page, and the user never visits a website. That is the definition of zero-click search, and AI Overviews have turned it from a slow drift into the default.

If you sell online, this is a traffic problem with a face. The pages you spent years ranking are still ranking, but the clicks that used to follow the ranking are disappearing into an AI-generated summary at the top of the page. This guide explains what zero-click search is now, why Google AI Overviews are accelerating it, how much eCommerce traffic is actually at risk, and the answer engine optimization playbook for getting your brand into the answer instead of being buried beneath it.

Overview

• Zero-click search is when Google answers a query directly on the results page, so the searcher never clicks through to a website. In 2024, it accounted for roughly 58-60% of Google searches (SparkToro).
• AI Overviews, Google’s AI-generated summary box, became the productized name in May 2024 and now appears on a large and growing share of queries.
• For eCommerce, the risk is not lost rankings, it is lost clicks behind kept rankings. Pew Research found that link clicks fall from 15% to 8% when an AI summary is present.

What is zero-click search?

Zero-click search is a Google search that ends on the results page, with the answer shown directly to the user without any clicks to any website. The information is available in a search feature, so the searcher’s need is met before a single blue link is clicked. These on-page answers can be:

• featured snippets and direct text answers
• AI Overviews, the AI-generated summary at the top of the page
• knowledge panels and instant facts
• local map packs and business listings
• product carousels pulled from Google’s Shopping Graph

In 2024, 58.5% of U.S. searches and 59.7% of E.U. searches ended without a click, per SparkToro’s 2024 study with Datos. That figure has been climbing for years, and the arrival of AI-generated answers has pushed it higher. The old industry shorthand was “about half of searches are zero-click.” The honest 2024 number is closer to three in five.

Why AI Overviews drive zero-click search

AI Overviews are the single biggest accelerant behind zero-click search, because they answer the whole query at the top of the page before the organic results even start. Instead of ten links, Google composes a summary from several sources and presents it as the headline result. The links still exist, but they sit below an answer that often makes clicking feel unnecessary.

A quick note on naming, since the terminology changed. Google first tested AI answers under the experimental label Search Generative Experience inside Search Labs. At Google I/O in May 2024 the company productized it and rebranded it as AI Overviews. If you read older coverage referencing SGE, it is describing the same feature under its retired name.

The expansion has been fast. Semrush data shows AI Overviews triggered for 6.49% of queries in January 2025 and 13.14% by March 2025, roughly doubling in a single quarter. Pew Research, analyzing real browsing behavior, found AI summaries appeared on around 18% of all Google searches it studied. The direction is one way, and it is up.

What makes AI Overviews different from a classic featured snippet is breadth. A snippet quotes one page. An overview synthesizes several, names a handful as sources, and answers follow-up intent in the same box. For a shopper researching a product, that can mean the comparison, the recommendation, and the reasoning all appear before they ever reach your product page.

What does zero-click search mean for eCommerce traffic?

In eCommerce, the measurable damage shows up as a drop in click-throughs, not a drop in rankings. Pew Research, in July 2025, studied 68,879 real Google searches and found that when an AI summary was present, users clicked a traditional result link only 8% of the time, compared with 15% when no summary appeared, a 47% drop. They clicked on a source cited inside the AI summary just 1% of the time. Sessions ended entirely 26% of the time when an AI summary was shown, against 16% without one.

Read those numbers as a merchant. Your category pages and buying guides can keep their positions, and your traffic can still fall by nearly half on any query Google decides to answer with a summary. The earlier projections of a “15 to 25% organic drop” were guesses. The Pew figure is measured behavior, and it is worse than the guess.

The product layer is shifting, too. When a shopper asks a buying question, Google increasingly returns a curated product view drawn from its Shopping Graph, which holds more than 35 billion product listings and counting. Whether your catalog appears in that view depends on your product data and structured markup, not on your homepage’s domain authority. This is the same surface where agentic commerce is heading, with AI assistants comparing and shortlisting products on the shopper’s behalf, raising the stakes for being machine-readable.

How to adapt: the AEO playbook for zero-click search

Adapting to zero-click search means optimizing to be the cited source inside the answer, which is the work of answer engine optimization rather than classic SEO alone. AEO restructures your content and data so AI Overviews and AI assistants can quote you cleanly. The practical moves break down like this:

1. Answer the question in the first two sentences. Lead each page and section with a direct, 40 to 60-word answer, then elaborate. AI systems extract the clean answer, not the slow build-up.
2. Add structured data. Mark up products, FAQs, how-tos, and reviews with schema so machines can parse facts without guessing. For product carousels, accurate, complete product data is what gets you into the Shopping Graph view.
3. Publish first-party substance. Original data, real benchmarks, named results, and clear authority are what AI engines prefer to cite over thin, derivative pages.
4. Cover the question cluster, not just the keyword. Map the follow-up questions a shopper asks and answer them on the page, because overviews reward sources that resolve the whole intent.
5. Measure what AI engines say about you. Rankings no longer tell the full story. Start tracking brand mentions in LLMs so you can see whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews are naming you, and for which queries.

A boutique furniture brand worked with scandiweb to restructure its content and product data for AI search and broke into the top 3 AI answers for its core category, capturing visibility inside the answer that classic ranking alone would not have delivered. That is the outcome our AI search optimization work is built for, named in the answer, even when the click never happens.

Should you still invest in SEO if searches are zero-click?

Yes, because zero-click and AEO build on SEO, they do not replace it. AI Overviews draw from pages that already rank well and carry topical authority, so strong technical search engine optimization remains the foundation that makes your content eligible for citation in the first place. The shift is in emphasis, not abandonment: keep earning rankings, then add the answer-shaped structure and data that lets those ranked pages get pulled into AI answers. Treating SEO and AEO as one program, rather than swapping one for the other, keeps visibility intact through the transition.

How do you know if AI Overviews are taking your traffic?

Look for the specific pattern of stable impressions and falling clicks on informational and comparison queries. In Search Console, segment your queries and watch for terms where your average position holds but your click-through rate drops; those are the queries Google is likely answering with a summary. Pair that with AI visibility tracking to see whether your brand is being mentioned in the answers. If impressions are steady, clicks are sliding, and you are absent from the AI answer, you have your diagnosis and your priority list.

FAQ

What is zero-click search?

Zero-click search is a Google search that provides answers directly on the results page, so the user gets what they need without clicking any links. In 2024, roughly 58-60% of Google searches ended this way, according to SparkToro.

Are AI Overviews and SGE the same thing?

Yes. Search Generative Experience (SGE) was the experimental name Google used in 2023 inside Search Labs. Google productized and rebranded the feature as AI Overviews at Google I/O in May 2024. AI Overviews is the current name.

How much eCommerce traffic do AI Overviews actually take?

Pew Research found that when an AI summary is present, users click a traditional result link only 8% of the time, compared with 15% without one, a drop of nearly 47%. Cited sources inside the summary are clicked just 1% of the time.

Does zero-click search mean SEO is dead?

No. AI Overviews pull from pages that already rank, so SEO still gets you eligible to be cited. The change is that ranking alone no longer guarantees a click, which is why answer engine optimization is added on top of SEO rather than replacing it.

What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?

AEO is the practice of structuring your content and data so that AI-driven search engines and assistants choose to cite your brand when they generate answers. It covers snippet-shaped answers, structured data, first-party content, and full question-cluster coverage.

How do I get my products into Google’s AI shopping results?

Accurate, complete, structured product data is the lever. Google’s Shopping Graph carries more than 35 billion product listings, and inclusion in AI-driven product views depends on machine-readable product information and schema, not on homepage authority alone.

How do I measure whether AI engines mention my brand?

Track brand mentions across AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and pair that with Search Console data showing where impressions hold but clicks fall. Together, they tell you which queries you are losing to AI answers.

Protecting your organic visibility under AI Overviews starts with knowing exactly which queries are answering shoppers without you. If you want a clear read on where AI search is quoting your competitors instead of you, get an AEO audit and we will map which of your queries are slipping into zero-click answers, and what it takes to win the citation back.

The post Zero-Click Search and AI Overviews: How to Adapt in 2026 appeared first on scandiweb.