#BlinkTank: Shopify filters bots out of your conversion rate
There’s good news for anyone frustrated about bot traffic - Shopify has changed how it measures sessions in Analytics, and the default view now (hopefully) filters out non-human visitors. Many stores are about to see a big jump in conversion rate, although nothing has actually changed.
After that: Google has dropped free product listings across the European Economic Area, ChatGPT Ads arrives for Shopify merchants outside the US, and Google is testing a change to how multi-seller products behave in Shopping.
On to the news!
Shopify (finally) makes bot filtering the default in Analytics
The upsurge in bot traffic over the last year or so has been an enormous source of frustration for merchants. Now Shopify is attempting to clean up its reporting to making it easier to understand if traffic is from genuine users.
On September 21, Shopify released a changelog entry reporting a change in how sessions are measured. The default sessions view now focuses on human visitors where the Human or bot filter is available, bot and system traffic is classified more consistently, while shopper journeys that never fired a standard pageview are kept rather than dropped.
Shopify added the Human or bot session filter back in October 2025, but you had to apply it yourself. Making it the default is a small but substantial change, and it matters because bot traffic stopped being a fringe problem a while ago.
Radware put bots at 57% of ecommerce traffic across the 2024 Q4 period, and in June 2026 Cloudflare's CEO reported automated systems overtaking humans in requests across their whole network. Merchants who have spent the past year saying half their sessions were never human were not exaggerating.
The consequence of all this is that for most stores your conversion rate is about to improve without anything actually changing. Shopify says to treat 21 September as a new baseline, and the same applies to add-to-cart rate, checkout conversion rate, pageviews per session and online store visitors.
🔗 Shopify Analytics session measurement improvements (Shopify Changelog)
🔗 Session measurement update (Shopify Help Center)
Google drops free product listings across Europe
Google removed its organic "popular products" carousels from search results across the European Economic Area in mid-September, and the drop was close to total within about two days. Productrise, which tracks product carousels daily, recorded falls of roughly 90 to 100% in Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands, with no change in the UK, the US or Australia. Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin has confirmed the removal is a Digital Markets Act compliance step.
Instead there now is a section labelled "Comparison Sites", listing several comparison shopping services in expandable rows, with one open by default. Google lists itself as one of those comparison sites, and expanding its own row opens something that approximates the old carousel.
This follows the search redesign Google rolled out across Europe on 8 September, after a €460m self-preferencing fine from the European Commission in July. Google told Reuters the redesign represents the largest reduction in quality of service in Search's 29-year history, which (obvious subtext aside) is an unusual thing for a company to say about its own product.
For UK-only stores nothing has changed. However, if a meaningful share of your organic revenue comes from EEA markets, it is worth making a note for upcoming reporting.
🔗 Google drops free product listings from the EEA (Search Engine Roundtable)
ChatGPT Ads launches Shopify merchants outside the US
OpenAI opened its ChatGPT Ads app to US Shopify merchants in mid-September, and it becomes available internationally today in markets where ChatGPT Ads are already active.
OpenAI is listed as the developer, installation is free, and it lets you create, run and manage ChatGPT ad campaigns without leaving Shopify.
The key part of this for the stores that we work with is that your products connect through Shopify Catalog, so there is no separate feed to build or maintain. This is another example of how important getting product data right at source has become in the eCommerce world. It's also exactly why we built our product data sprint service (see below).
🔗 Set up ChatGPT Ads for Shopify (OpenAI)
Google tests a blue "More" link on multi-seller listings
When several retailers sell the same product, Google merges them into one listing with a grey "& more" label. Brodie Clark spotted Google testing a much more visible version, a blue "More >" link next to the main seller, and in the test a click goes straight through to a retailer's site rather than opening a panel of other sellers.
It is very much test rather than an announcement, so it may not come to anything. The point behind it is interesting though: Productrise puts the share of ranking products sold by multiple sellers at 41%, and a more clickable label spreads clicks to retailers who are not in the top slot.
🔗 Google Search tests blue More link in Shopping results (Search Engine Roundtable)
Shopify's ships admin redesign - and admin goes down
On 15 September Shopify began rolling out a new look for the admin - new colour, type, spacing and icons across every page, inside a new frame. Search, notifications and the store picker have moved into the side navigation, which now collapses, while Sidekick has moved out of its side panel and become a floating chat you can reach from anywhere.
The same day, we noticed that most stores we worked were unable to log into the Shopify admin. The company’s status page logged an incident titled "Shopify Admins are experiencing degraded performance", which ran for three hours and thirty-five minutes and took in admin logins, POS and support contact performance. Shopify has not said the two are linked, but the timing seems suspect, to say the least.
🔗 A new look for the Shopify admin (Shopify Changelog)
Google now wants adult products labelled in your feed
Google has updated its guidelines for sites with explicit content and added a line aimed squarely at eCommerce - label adult products in eCommerce feeds or markup. There is also a new section at the foot of the document covering Google Shopping features specifically.
In practice, if anything in your catalogue counts as adult-oriented under Google's Merchant Center policy, it needs flagging either with the adult attribute in your feed or with hasAdultConsideration structured data on the page. Google is explicit that the label does not affect your visibility in organic web search results, so this is more about Shopping compliance rather than SEO.
For most large-catalogue stores this is a handful of products rather than the whole range, which is exactly why it tends to get missed. If you sell anything in the categories Google treats as adult-oriented, a check in your feed this week is advisable.
🔗 Guidelines for sites with explicit content (Google Search Central)
Why we built the product data sprint
Several of this week's stories converge on the same point. Free listings across the EEA have gone, which makes the surfaces that remain matter more, and ChatGPT Ads draws on the same Shopify Catalog data that already feeds your agentic storefronts. On a multi-seller listing the levers left to you are data quality, enrichment, images and product highlights, and even the adult labelling change comes down to a feed attribute. Product data is doing the work in all of them.
We introduced this a couple of issues back and the interest since has been steady enough to be repeat again. In our own client work, fixing product data tends to lift revenue by around 20% with no increase in ad spend.
Alongside product data, the sprint covers the groundwork we do on every engagement regardless of size: tracking, taxonomy, and the custom Shopify modules and fixes we have refined over years of doing this kind of work day in, day out.
If you manage a large-catalogue store and want to see what that looks like in practice, drop me a message or find me at blinkseo.co.uk.
🔗 Find out more about the product data sprint
Jobs
Hiring:
Austen & Blake are looking for an E-commerce Trading Manager in London. They are a made-to-order jewellery brand, so it is a large catalogue with a lot of variant complexity behind it, which makes it a good fit for anyone who has managed trading across that kind of range.
Vera Bradley are hiring an Ecommerce Product Analyst to work alongside their ecommerce product team, turning data and customer behaviour into changes to the digital experience. US-based.
Bathshack are looking for an E-Commerce Web and Data Administrator in Coleraine. It is a product and pricing data role across Bathshack.com, eBay, B&Q and other marketplaces, running on Shopify, with Google Merchant Center and feed management listed as a nice-to-have rather than a requirement.
If you are hiring and the role fits someone with large-catalogue Shopify experience, or you are looking and have that background, send me a message.
As ever, thanks for reading. If you found this useful, forwarding it on to someone else who runs or works on a large-catalogue Shopify store helps us more than just about anything.
See you next week.
Sam
Who am I and what does Blink do?
I'm Sam Wright, Managing Director and co-founder of Blink SEO. We're a search marketing agency that works exclusively with large-catalogue Shopify stores - the kind where the challenge isn't just visibility, but helping customers find the right product in the first place.
We specialise in SEO and PPC for merchants managing hundreds or thousands of products. Most of our work starts with taxonomy: how a store is structured and categorised, and what that means for organic performance, paid efficiency, and on-site discovery.
If you found this useful and aren't already subscribed, you can sign up at blinkseo.co.uk/blinktank.
If you run a large-catalogue Shopify store and want to talk about organic or paid performance, reply to this email or find me at blinkseo.co.uk.