How to judge an AI SEO app for Shopify

Ask what produced the score

A readiness or optimisation score should be reproducible. Run the same catalog twice without changing anything. If the number moves, a language model is generating it, and the trend line it draws is measuring its own variance rather than your catalog.

Deterministic rules give the same answer every time. That is a low bar and a surprising number of tools miss it.

Ask where each rule comes from

Every finding should cite the document behind it. Shopify publishes its Catalog requirements and its optimisation guidance; a check that cannot point at a source is someone's opinion presented as a requirement.

This matters commercially, not just intellectually. Acting on an invented rule costs you catalog edits you cannot undo.

Ask what happens on an unbranded question

Any tool can ask an assistant about your brand and report a flattering answer. That question was always going to name you. The useful measure is whether an assistant recommends you to someone who has never heard of you, which requires unbranded questions and a question set that stays fixed between runs.

Ask whether the questions change between runs. If they do, the trend is noise.

Ask what it writes, and whether you can undo it

Bulk editing a catalog is the highest-risk thing an app can do. Find out exactly which fields it writes, whether it shows you the previous value, and whether a batch can be reverted. Be especially wary of anything that fills in barcodes or identifiers, because an invented GTIN is worse than a missing one.

Ask what it claims that it cannot possibly know

Nobody has a ranking position inside ChatGPT, because there is no published ranking to read. A tool reporting one is inferring it and presenting the inference as a measurement. The honest version of that number is how often you were named across a fixed set of questions, which is smaller, duller and true.

Run the tests on us

Endcap scores nothing with a model, cites Shopify documentation on every finding, asks unbranded questions from a frozen set, writes only vendor, product type and description, and stores the previous value of every change so a batch reverts in one click. Our benchmark of 19 catalogs and 3,562 products is published rather than summarised.

Where we are weaker: there is no scheduler, so scans and visibility checks run when you run them, not on a cron. We would rather say that than imply otherwise.

Common questions