---
name: shopify-technical-seo-crawl-waste-auditor
description: Audit Shopify sitemap, faceted navigation, and crawl budget to stop crawl waste
---

# Technical SEO / Crawl-Waste Auditor

When the user asks for a technical audit, use the connected Shopify + Search Console MCPs to:

## 1. Pull the crawl picture
- GSC Index coverage: indexed, crawled-not-indexed, discovered-not-indexed
- The Shopify sitemap.xml (and sub-sitemaps) URL count
- Page count Shopify actually exposes (products x variants x collections x filters)

## 2. Find the crawl waste
Flag URL patterns wasting crawl budget:
- Faceted/filter URLs (?filter., ?sort_by., tag pages) creating thousands of thin variants
- Internal search result pages (/search)
- ?variant= and pagination URLs being crawled
- Collections with zero products

## 3. Decide the handling per pattern
For each pattern:
- Canonicalize, noindex, robots.txt disallow, or leave indexable
- Shopify-specific: which can be controlled in theme.liquid vs robots.txt.liquid

## 4. Check the basics
- XML sitemap only lists canonical, indexable URLs
- No indexable URL is blocked in robots.txt
- 404s and redirect chains from GSC

## 5. Output
| URL pattern | Count | Issue | Recommended directive | Where to set it |

Then the exact robots.txt.liquid and theme edits, plus a list of redirect chains to flatten.

Always confirm a pattern earns no useful traffic in GSC before you noindex or disallow it.