How to use SEO Rating

Getting started

Installing the app

Install SEO Rating from its Shopify App Store listing (“TNS SEO & AI Visibility”). Shopify shows you the permissions the app needs before you approve. It reads and writes the SEO-related parts of your store: products, pages and blog articles, uploaded files, your theme (to find images missing alt text) and URL redirects. Approving the install opens the app inside your Shopify admin. There’s no separate account or password to create.

What happens after install

Your catalog syncs automatically in the background: titles, descriptions, images, variants and collections. Nothing in your store changes. The sync just gives every tool the data it needs, and product creates, updates and deletes keep it current through Shopify webhooks, so there’s no re-sync button to remember.

There’s no setup wizard. Every tool works from sensible defaults the moment you open it. Settings lets you set an AI brand name (the name AI-written copy credits, if it differs from your Shopify store name) and a default output language. Both are optional.

SEO Tags

Two related tools for the text that decides how your pages are described in search results and to AI systems: meta tags and image alt tags.

Meta titles and descriptions

Edit the meta title and description of every product, collection, page, blog and article. There are three ways to fill them:

• Template. Build a pattern once with variables like {Product title} or {Shop name} and apply it across many items at once. Templates don’t use AI credits.
• AI Generate. Write unique tags for each item from its actual content. Drafts appear next to the current value so you can compare before saving.
• Import. Upload a CSV of tags you already wrote elsewhere and apply them in bulk.

Applying a template can fill only empty fields or overwrite existing ones; you choose. Either way, every save creates a checkpoint, and Restore previous writes the old values straight back to Shopify.

Image alt tags

The app finds images with missing or empty alt text and writes descriptions of what’s actually in each image. It looks at the picture, not just the filename. It covers product, collection and article images, standalone uploads in your Files library, and images used in your theme such as banners and section images. Review and edit the results in a list, then save; alt text is written back to Shopify.

Alt text helps accessibility first and search second. Screen readers read exactly what you save, so review anything that describes people, claims or context.

Page Optimization

A real on-page audit for products, collections, articles, blogs, other pages and your home page. Each page gets an SEO Health checklist across four categories (Basic SEO, Additional checks, Title readability and Content readability), covering keyword presence and position, content length, URL length, internal and outbound links, image usage and paragraph length. Each check says what’s wrong and why it matters.

The AI Optimizer takes a focus keyword and drafts a title, description, handle and tags for that page in one go. You can carry a keyword over from Keyword Research. If you change a URL handle, the app creates a redirect from the old URL automatically, so existing links keep working.

Search Appearance

Everything that controls how your store is represented to search engines at a technical level.

Structured data (JSON-LD)

Seven schema types, each a toggle: Product and Breadcrumb on product pages, Collection on collection pages, Article and Blog on your blog, and Site search box and Organization on your home page. They’re added through the app’s theme app embed, which you switch on once in the theme editor. Then use Run test to confirm the markup appears on your live store.

Local Business

If you have a physical location, enter your business name, address, phone and opening hours, and the app publishes Local Business structured data for it. Useful where local intent matters, and for making your business details unambiguous to AI assistants.

Google Search Console and Instant Index

Connect your Google account to see real Search Console data in the app: clicks, impressions, average position, and your top queries and pages. With the same connection, Instant Index submits your URLs to Google’s Indexing API as a crawl signal. Google documents that API for job-posting and livestream pages, so treat it as a request, not a guarantee. Disconnecting Google deletes the stored tokens.

Robots.txt

See your live robots.txt rules, add or remove rules per crawler (including AI crawlers), or switch to a raw text editor. This is the one area where a mistake can hide your store from search, so read the effective file carefully before you save.

URL Management

HTML sitemap

Your Shopify sitemap.xml stays untouched and is still what you submit to Search Console. The app adds a separate, human-readable HTML sitemap page (for example, linked from your footer) that lists your products, collections, pages, blogs and articles for visitors and crawlers.

Broken links

The app scans products, collections, pages, blogs and articles for links that no longer resolve, such as deleted products, mistyped URLs or dead external pages. Turn on Auto fix and internal broken links get a real redirect to the destination you choose. External links can only be reported, since you can’t redirect a page you don’t control.

AI Visibility

People now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini what to buy. These tools make your store easy for those systems to read and reference correctly. No tool can guarantee an assistant will cite you; what you control is whether your store is easy to understand.

llms.txt and agents.md

The app generates both files from your real store data and serves them on your domain. llms.txt is a clean summary of what your store is and sells, in a form language models can read without wading through theme markup. agents.md describes your store for AI agents, including key pages and policies. You review and can edit both before publishing. Read more in What is llms.txt, and does your Shopify store need one?

IndexNow

IndexNow tells participating search engines the moment a URL changes instead of waiting for a recrawl. Submitting through Bing relays to the other participating engines, such as Yandex, Seznam and Naver. Google doesn’t take part in IndexNow; use Instant Index for Google.

Outreach tracker

A simple tracker for your own outreach to the AI publishers, directories and data sources you’d like to be listed or cited by. Add entries, then track status and notes. It keeps you organized; it doesn’t send anything for you.

Keyword Research

Enter a seed keyword and get real search volume, competition, trend and search intent, plus related keyword suggestions, from a dedicated keyword data provider. Save the keywords you want to target, and use Link to page to carry one into Page Optimization as that page’s focus keyword.

Generate topics turns a keyword into six article ideas, each with a content angle like “Buying guide” or “Comparison”. Pick one and the Article generator writes a full draft (title, body and tags) that you review, edit and publish into the Shopify blog you choose.

Store Performance

Run a real Google PageSpeed Insights audit for four page slots you choose: your home page, a product, a collection and a blog post. You get mobile and desktop Performance, Accessibility, Best practices and SEO scores, plus Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS). Field data from real visitors appears when Google has enough of it.

Testing is limited to 12 slot tests a day on every plan, because all shops share one Google quota. Speed fixes usually live in your theme or apps, so treat this as a diagnostic: take a baseline, re-test after theme or app changes, and hand the findings to whoever maintains your theme.

Something unclear, or a step that doesn’t match what you see in the app? Tell us and we’ll fix the docs.