Research
Ecommerce SEO statistics 2026
Original statistics from an outside-in audit of 963 online stores, sampled at random from the Tranco top 1M list and read the way a search crawler sees them. Published 26 September 2026 under CC BY 4.0.
About this study
Shipwork ran its own 20-page audit on each store from outside the owner's network, so every result reflects what a crawler can actually fetch. The stores were drawn at random from the Tranco top 1M list, then confirmed as live online stores; 963 completed the full audit. This page collects every measured statistic in one place, each with the share of the 963 audited stores it applies to and a link to the check that produced it.
The full write-up, with per-platform breakdowns and the benchmark distribution, is in the State of Ecommerce SEO 2026 report.
The statistics
Each figure below is the share of the 963 audited stores that the check found. Percentages under 10 are shown to one decimal place; the base for each figure is given as n. A few checks applied to 928 stores rather than 963, which is stated in the n beside each result.
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19% of the stores we audited publish no DMARC record at all, so anyone can send email that claims to come from them.
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75% of the stores we audited do not enforce DMARC (no record, or a monitoring-only p=none policy).
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12% of the stores we audited have no SPF record, so their order and newsletter email is more likely to land in spam.
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2.9% of the stores we audited block at least one AI crawler in robots.txt.
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1.7% of the stores we audited block OpenAI's GPTBot.
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79% of the stores we audited publish an llms.txt file for AI assistants.
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8.0% of the stores we audited serve at least one page with a JSON-LD block that is not valid JSON (for example a trailing comma or a raw line break in a text value).
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13% of the stores we audited list at least one product with no valid price in its public catalogue.
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46% of the stores we audited have at least one product that is fully out of stock in every variant.
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6.5% of the stores we audited have dead internal links among the links checked.
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8.3% of the stores we audited serve a page that answers 200 but reads like "not found" (a soft 404).
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6.1% of the stores we audited list a noindex page in their sitemap, sending Google contradictory signals.
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45% of the stores we audited serve at least one image over 250 KB on the pages checked.
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41% of the stores we audited serve images only in legacy formats, with no WebP or AVIF.
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48% of the stores we audited have images with no alt text on the pages checked.
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36% of the stores we audited link no shipping policy page that we could find.
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31% of the stores we audited link no returns or refund policy page that we could find.
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How to cite
Shipwork. The State of Ecommerce SEO 2026. 26 September 2026. https://shipwork.io/research/ecommerce-seo-statistics (CC BY 4.0).
Data licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may share and adapt these figures, including commercially, with credit to Shipwork and a link to this page.
Methodology in brief
A public, outside view from one crawl. The audit reads up to 20 pages per store and cannot see anything behind a login, a paywall or a bot rule.
- Sample
- Random stores drawn from the Tranco top 1M list
- List
- Tranco L5PZ4 (created 2026-09-25)
- Seed
- 2026
- Domains probed
- 22,389
- Stores confirmed
- 1,000
- Stores audited
- 963
- Blocked by bot protection
- 24 (4 Shopify, 20 WooCommerce)
- Unreachable
- 13
- Pages read
- 19,127 (up to 20 per store)
- robots.txt
- Honoured for every store; 538 pages were refused by robots.txt and not read