The Shopify Product Data Audit: Why 97% of Your Alt Text Might Be Wrong
We audited a Shopify furniture store with 16,000+ product images. 97% had the wrong brand in the alt text. Here's how to find and fix the same problem in your store.
Why This Happens
Alt text rarely gets audited. It's invisible to customers, so it doesn't trigger support tickets. It's set once during product upload and forgotten. If you use Matrixify, a third-party feed, or a manual import process, whatever value was in the supplier's data becomes your alt text — and stays there indefinitely.
When we ran a full data audit on a UK furniture retailer's Shopify store earlier this year, we expected to find some issues. What we found was worse.
Out of 16,193 product image rows, 15,668 — just under 97% — had the wrong brand name embedded in the alt text. The legal entity name of the holding company had been baked into every image's alt attribute when the product catalogue was originally set up, and no one had ever checked.
How to Audit Your Store
Step 1 — Export via Matrixify
Export your Products sheet from Matrixify. The column you need is "Image Alt Text". Filter it and check for values that shouldn't be there: supplier names, legal entity names, placeholder text, or blank values.
Step 2 — Check the scale of the problem
In Excel or Python, count how many rows contain unexpected values. Our client's 97% figure sounds extreme — but we've seen 40–60% error rates in stores that have been running for 3+ years without an audit.
Step 3 — Build a remediation script
Python + openpyxl works well here. The logic is straightforward: if the alt text contains [wrong value], replace with [Product Title] + [Vendor] + [Brand]. Export the corrected file and import back via Matrixify with Command: MERGE.
Step 4 — Fix the Liquid template
Even after a bulk fix, your Shopify theme's image rendering Liquid may be pulling alt text from a field that gets overwritten on the next product sync. Check your product image Liquid and ensure it references image.alt with a sensible fallback.
What This Is Worth
Image alt text is a genuine ranking signal for Google Image Search — especially for product photography. If your images are currently attributed to the wrong brand, you're invisible for brand + product searches that should be driving traffic.
This kind of data remediation sits at the foundation of any LLM search readiness strategy — AI models rely heavily on structured product data to surface recommendations.
For our client, fixing 16,193 rows took two days of scripting and one Matrixify import. That's a small investment against the visibility recovery.
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If you'd like us to run a data audit on your Shopify store, book a free 30-minute teardown.