Schema-vs-Page Consistency Index Methodology
For this report, StoreSteady evaluated a frozen corpus of 100 Shopify storefronts. This page documents selection, denominator, exclusion, redaction, source, and version rules.
Corpus And Window
Selection rule: Deterministic rank-stratified 100-store tranche from the frozen external_top_500 Shopify storefront corpus; no merchant-identifying examples are published.
Freeze timestamp: 2026-05-21T22:00:01.570Z
Evaluation window: 2026-05-26T02:47:00.000Z to 2026-05-26T02:48:44.361Z
Fields collected: visible PDP product and offer evidence, Product/ProductGroup/Offer JSON-LD, visible and structured price and availability signals, canonical, sitemap, Offer.url, and image signals, visible return and shipping policy pages, MerchantReturnPolicy and OfferShippingDetails JSON-LD, visible contact and footer identity evidence, Organization, LocalBusiness, Store, and OnlineStore JSON-LD.
Denominator Rules
Every published rate has its own evaluable N and Wilson 95% confidence interval.
Access friction, detector non-evaluability, deterministic conflicts, tentative findings, and confirmed findings are kept separate.
No blended denominator is used in this report.
Metric Quality Table
| Metric | Tier | N | Count | CI | Caveat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| deterministic_schema_page_conflict | Headline | 19 | 6 | 15.4% - 54.0% | Deterministic field comparison only; missing counterpart states are reported separately and are not legal sufficiency or trustworthiness claims. |
| missing_structured_counterpart | Supporting | 19 | 11 | 36.3% - 76.9% | Counts stores where visible public evidence existed for at least one field but the structured counterpart was missing. |
| missing_visible_counterpart | Supporting | 19 | 1 | 0.94% - 24.6% | Counts stores where structured public evidence existed for at least one field but the visible page counterpart was missing from the scanned public evidence. |
| blocked_or_noindex | Limitation | 100 | 75 | 65.7% - 82.5% | Separated from findings. Blocked/noindex stores are not counted as schema-vs-page conflicts. |
| not_evaluable_after_access | Limitation | 100 | 6 | 2.78% - 12.5% | The crawl reached public evidence but did not collect enough field-level counterparts to classify a store-level finding. |
Redaction Policy
- No store names, raw domains, raw URLs, raw crawl text, or raw AI responses are published.
- No exact promo codes, private feed/admin evidence, or merchant-identifying product examples are published.
- Public examples fail closed unless Caleb explicitly approves the specific exposure.
Related Public Benchmarks
This report is not a placement dashboard, market forecast, AEO forecast, or financial impact estimate. It measures evidence quality and evaluability under the StoreSteady public research protocol.
Sources
- Google merchant listing structured data - Structured-data context for Product, Offer, shipping, return, and merchant listing evidence.
- Google return policy structured data - MerchantReturnPolicy context for public return-policy counterpart checks.
- Schema.org OfferShippingDetails - Shipping-details context for structured shipping counterpart checks.
- Schema.org Organization - Organization and contact metadata context for business identity counterpart checks.
- StoreSteady published aggregate report JSON - Published aggregate artifact used as the source of calibrated public-report counts.
- OpenAI crawler documentation - Context for AI crawler and robots controls; not used as a ranking or reach claim.
- Google robots.txt guidance - Crawler-access context for robots restrictions and non-circumventing evaluation.
- Google merchant listing structured data - Public product-structured-data context for merchant listing evidence.
- OpenAI product feed specification - Product-data freshness context; not used as a connected-merchant-data audit.
- Shopify product taxonomy - Shopify product-data context for product categorization and storefront facts.
Version History
- 2026-summer.public-v1.1 (2026-05-26): Widened Schema-vs-Page tranche from 50 to 100 stores; clarified field-row detector primitive denominators and explicit limitation rows.
- 2026-summer.public-v1 (2026-05-26): Initial public report from a 1-3 store smoke and rank-stratified 50-store deterministic schema-page comparison tranche.