When your homepage is a JavaScript redirect

Your homepage is the page most likely to be fetched first and the one crawlers weigh most heavily. If it contains a script that immediately sends the visitor somewhere else, what a crawler records is a blank document.

What causes it

Nearly always an app rather than the theme: geolocation redirects sending visitors to a regional storefront, age verification, currency or language gates, and pre-launch splash pages left in place after launch.

Fixing it without losing the behaviour

Use Shopify’s Markets for regional routing rather than a script. It handles country routing at the platform level, so crawlers get real content and shoppers still land in the right place.

Where the gate has to stay — age verification is often a legal requirement — render the real homepage content in the HTML and overlay the gate on top of it, rather than replacing the page with the gate. The content is then served, readable, and still behind the interstitial for humans.

Then confirm with curl -s https://yourstore.com/ | head -c 2000. If what comes back is a script tag and nothing else, the redirect is still the whole page.

Checking your own store

The scan below reads your storefront the way a crawler does and reports this check along with the rest. It is free and needs no account.

Free, no signup. Takes about ten seconds.

The other checks

• Product structured data on Shopify
• Allowing AI shopping crawlers on Shopify
• When your product page needs JavaScript to read
• llms.txt on Shopify
• What your agent endpoint serves
• When your Shopify sitemap is missing
• Page titles and descriptions on Shopify

Installs on any Shopify store. The free plan needs no card, and the dashboard runs on sample data if you would rather look first. Shopify will note that the app has not been reviewed yet: the App Store listing is still in review, and that governs who can find Shelfglance, not who can install it.