How GMC Scout scans a store

What a scan reads

Only the public storefront — the pages any visitor can open. We never log into Merchant Center, never read or change your product feed, and never submit anything to Google.

A scan starts from the homepage, the standard Shopify policy URLs and the usual contact-page paths, then discovers products, collections and pages from the store’s own public Shopify catalogue data. GMC Scout is built for Shopify and does not scan other platforms.

Every URL gets checked

Every seeded and discovered URL receives an HTTP status check, so broken links are counted across the whole crawl rather than a sample. We do not cut the crawl short to save cost.

The pages the report depends on most — homepage, policies, contact and other /pages/ — are fetched first and retried more. A store that rate-limits us is waited out rather than skipped.

Contact pages have no fixed Shopify address, so we try several common spellings to find yours. A spelling that does not exist on your store is never reported as a broken link.

A page we could not read is never reported as missing

Only two answers are treated as facts: the page loaded and we read it, or the store returned “not found”. A timeout, a rate limit or a server error means we never found out, so that page is not reported as missing and is not credited as passing either.

If a URL still gives no answer after retries, the scan fails instead of producing a report with a hole in it. You can run it again.

How findings are decided

Structural checks — does the page exist, does it load over HTTPS, do links point at the right domain, are collections empty — are made directly from the pages we fetched.

Policy details are different: a language model reads the text of your shipping, returns and contact pages and extracts specific facts, such as the return window, who pays return postage, shipping cost and delivery time. Each fact is its own check, so a policy page that exists but states nothing fails several lines rather than passing on one.

Severity

Every finding carries one of three tiers. The tier is assigned in one place for every surface — report, PDF and email — so the same issue is never described two different ways.

Blocks approval

Named on Google's published website-audit list. Fix these before you request another review.

Weakens your appeal

A detail Google's audit list asks for that is missing from a policy you do have. Reviewers look for these.

Housekeeping

Storefront quality. Not published as an approval requirement — worth fixing, but not what is holding you up.

The score

The compliance score counts compliance checks only. Broken-link coverage is reported separately as a count of pages checked and pages that returned 404, because folding one check per crawled page into the percentage would make a large store look better the more pages it has.

The score is never shown in green while a finding in the top tier is open.

What a storefront scan cannot know

Google does not tell merchants the exact line item behind a decision, and a crawl of the public site cannot see everything Google can. GMC Scout does not see:

• Anything inside your Merchant Center account — business information, shipping and return settings, verification status, or the notice Google sent.
• Your product feed, its attributes, or item-level disapprovals.
• Ad account history, payment processing, or third-party information Google may consult.
• Checkout end to end. We confirm HTTPS and crawl public pages; we never place a test order.
• Placeholder or template copy such as a bracketed [COMPANY NAME], and some promotion patterns such as a pre-selected subscription. Those are a manual read.

So a clean report is not a promise of approval or reinstatement. It means the storefront items we can check are in order.

Where the rules come from

The checks map onto what Google Merchant Center Help publishes: consistent business information, explicit shipping, refund and privacy policies, and pages that work over HTTPS. Our guides cite the specific Help articles. The “70+ checks” figure means 33 finding types plus one HTTP status check per crawled URL on a normal-sized store — it is not a count of Google’s rules.

Free scan and report unlock

The free scan (one every 24 hours, signup required) shows how many issues were found, their severity and the category each falls into. Unlocking the report ($49, one payment, no subscription) shows each issue by name with its evidence, the affected URLs, fix guidance and a PDF. It also covers that store for 30 days, so re-scans to check your fixes come back unlocked.

GMC Scout is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with Google. Google alone makes all Merchant Center approval and enforcement decisions.