What Gets Checked

A full breakdown of every check in a Tier 1 scan. Every check is on by default and can be turned off individually from Scan Settings.

Severity Levels

Every finding carries one of four severities, shown as a colored badge:

• Critical - something is broken outright: a page returns an error, robots.txt blocks your whole site from search engines, a menu item points nowhere
• Major - a real quality problem that affects shoppers or search visibility, but nothing is completely broken
• Warning - a smaller issue worth cleaning up - a missing alt text, a short meta description
• Human review - not necessarily wrong, but worth a look - for example, a theme still on its default, uncustomized settings

Crawl & Discovery

Before any check runs, SQA builds the list of pages to check against:

• Crawl - follows every link starting from your homepage, capped to a reasonable depth. Unreachable pages found this way are reported under the links check.
• Catalog seeding - separately seeds every product, collection, and page URL straight from the Admin API, so anything not linked from your homepage still gets checked.
• Storefront unlock - if a preview password is set, SQA logs in through Shopify’s password gate before crawling, so it checks your real pages instead of the lock screen.

Links & Structure

• Broken links and unreachable pages (links) - broken, empty, or placeholder hrefs, and links whose label doesn’t match where they actually go
• Broken redirects (redirects) - redirects that don’t resolve correctly
• Empty collections and messy handles (structure) - collections with no products, and URL handles that look auto-generated or inconsistent
• Navigation menus (navigation) - empty menus and menu items pointing at a deleted resource

Content

• Placeholder text on pages (placeholders) - leftover theme-demo or lorem-ipsum-style text on live pages
• Disallowed words on pages (disallowed_content) - anything matching your disallowed words list
• Content in a language you don’t allow (language, AI-detected) - page copy and theme content written in a language outside your allowed languages

SEO & Meta

• Titles, descriptions and alt text (meta) - missing or duplicate titles/descriptions, length outside SEO best practice, and missing image alt text
• Favicon (favicon) - a missing or broken favicon
• robots.txt and sitemap (crawlability) - missing sitemap, or a robots.txt that blanket-blocks search engines
• Mobile viewport meta tag (viewport) - missing viewport meta, which breaks mobile rendering
• Open Graph tags (open_graph) - missing social-preview metadata
• Mixed content (mixed_content) - http:// resources loaded on an https:// page

Media

• Broken images on pages (media) - missing <img> sources and images that fail to load
• Products/collections missing images (media_catalog) - catalog entries with no image at all

Catalog Quality

• Product catalog quality (product_catalog_quality) - missing descriptions, $0 prices, products marked active but out of stock, duplicate SEO titles, and messy product handles
• Duplicate SKUs (duplicate_skus) - the same SKU used across more than one variant
• Policy pages linked (policies) - required policy pages (refund, privacy, terms, shipping) not linked anywhere
• Policy pages configured with content (policy_content) - a policy that’s linked but has no actual content set

Accessibility & Performance

• Accessibility basics (accessibility) - missing page-language attribute, broken heading structure, unlabeled form fields, and links with no discernible name
• Performance basics (performance) - render-blocking scripts, images with no explicit size, and an excessive script count

Theme Source

Theme source (theme_source) checks your live theme’s actual Liquid and JSON files - not just what renders on a page - for placeholder text and disallowed words hiding in unused sections or hidden locale strings, broken asset_url references, missing required templates, invalid settings_schema.json or settings_data.json, and a theme still left on its default, uncustomized settings. It also checks the theme’s reference graph: snippets, sections, blocks, and translation strings that are referenced but missing, or defined but never used anywhere.

Theme Upload

Theme upload (theme_upload) only runs when you attach a theme .zip on the Scans page. It runs the same theme source checks against the uploaded archive, under its own check name so its findings never collide with your live theme’s. This is how you can audit a theme before it’s ever pushed to your store.

What's Not Checked Yet

Every scan today runs as Tier 1. A planned Tier 2 - screenshots plus a vision model for visual and responsive-layout analysis - is on the roadmap but hasn’t been built yet. See Plans & Billing for how this fits into pricing once it exists.