Reviews help a shop get found only if search engines and AI assistants can read them. We read 2,718 Shopify product pages the way a crawler does, and checked whether the reviews on each page were actually there.
A newer, larger study read 47,062 stores, with figures by category, market and review count: the Shopify reviews study 2026.
What we found
Every store in the study had reviews on the product we read. On three in four of them, a search engine or AI assistant reading the page as it arrives would find no customer reviews to use.
Why the reviews could not be read
Four checks on every page
Share of stores where each check failed, out of 2,718.
- 75%The reviews are not in the page itself
- 45%The rating is not written out in the page
- 33%No star markup for Google in the page as sent
- 32%Nothing in the page says who the store is
How we did it
- Stores
- 2,718 Shopify stores whose product had reviews
- Pages
- One product page per store: the one with the most reviews we could find
- How it was read
- As the server sent it, without running JavaScript, as a crawler first sees it
- When
- Scanned 27 to 30 September 2026
This is not a random sample. We found the stores by checking public lists of websites for ones running on Shopify, and by searching store directories, with more weight on some categories, such as supplements and alcohol, than a random sample would have. Treat the figures as a picture of the stores we read, not of every Shopify store.
What the scan does not show. Google can run JavaScript, and may later see reviews that were not in the page as sent. The scan shows what a crawler gets on its first read. Many AI assistants’ crawlers do not run JavaScript at all. A store’s theme and setup play a part as well as its review app.
You are welcome to quote these figures. Please link to this page and give the number of stores and the date with them.
Check your own store
Our free scan reads your product page the same way and shows what a crawler finds.