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Learn how to overcome Magento’s common SEO challenges and build a fast, structured, and AI-ready ecommerce store.
Magento, now officially Adobe Commerce (but still known as Magento with SEOs), remains a powerful but demanding ecommerce platform, especially in the Magento 2 era.
Adobe Commerce can deliver strong organic performance when built and optimized correctly, but it requires careful attention to technical SEO, site speed, and structured data. This guide outlines key Magento/Adobe Commerce SEO challenges and how to set your store up for long-term success in 2026.
It offers deep flexibility, strong product catalog capabilities, and enterprise-grade customization, which is why major brands like RadioShack and The National Gallery still rely on it today. But technical SEO on Magento can be challenging if the build, theme, and extensions are not handled with care.
Modern Magento builds must go beyond legacy SEO thinking. Alongside fundamentals like crawl efficiency and URL handling, store owners now need to consider Core Web Vitals, mobile-first indexing, structured data for product discovery, and visibility in AI-driven search experiences.
Magento can perform very well for organic search when implemented correctly, but out of the box, it is not optimized. Many of the known issues are fixable with the proper development and SEO process in place.
Magento 2 can deliver strong performance, but it requires the right hosting stack, theme, and caching setup. In a mobile-first and Core Web Vitals world, speed and stability are not optional, as they influence rankings, conversion rates, and how efficiently Google can crawl your store.
To build a fast Magento site, focus on solid hosting, full-page caching, Varnish, and Redis. Reducing JavaScript bloat from extensions, compressing images into modern formats like WebP or AVIF, and lazy-loading heavy assets also help keep load times low. Regular audits in tools like Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights make sure you stay aligned with Core Web Vitals.
Crawl efficiency is another important consideration. Your mobile version needs to load all core content and links, since Google now uses mobile crawling. It helps to maintain a clear category structure and server-side rendering for critical templates, so search engines can discover and interpret key content easily. Log file analysis is also useful to understand what Googlebot sees and where it may be wasting crawl budget.
On the infrastructure side, a CDN helps with serving assets quickly globally, while running PHP 8+ and MySQL 8 ensures stronger performance and security. Server-side caching layers further support speed and consistency.
In my experience, Magento sites often become slow due to heavy themes and unnecessary extensions. Always question whether a module is needed and consider its impact on JavaScript and DOM complexity.
A slow site can cost both traffic and sales. Faster sites convert better and get crawled more frequently by Google.
There is more to performance than these points, but focusing on hosting, caching, and efficient rendering gives your store a strong foundation.
Key priorities to keep in mind:
Modern Magento product SEO is not just about fixing duplication. The goal is to help search engines understand products as entities, scale content efficiently, and support both shoppers and AI-driven discovery.
Configurable products should hold the primary authority. Simple SKUs used for variations (color, size, style) should:
This prevents duplicate content, consolidates ranking signals, and aligns with Google’s preference for primary entity pages.
You need to ensure canonicals are server-side rendered and not dependent on JavaScript.
Magento default document titles are still too generic, and leave a lot of opportunity for optimization.
Your title strategy should scale but remain meaningful. For scale, it’s easy enough to use a template (such as the one below), and then modify key pages with bespoke titles as needed.
Which would generate a title like: Men’s Navy Wool Sweater – Medium
For larger catalogs, you should:
Header tags shape how both users and search engines understand a product page. I’ve seen Magento themes sometimes misuse or duplicate headers, which weakens content structure and confuses algorithms trying to interpret page hierarchy.
A clean structure with one H1 for the product name helps search engines immediately identify the primary entity.
Supporting sections such as details, reviews, and shipping information should use H2 tags so AI systems and Google can parse the content into digestible, meaningful blocks. A structured hierarchy also improves accessibility and user experience, which, in turn, supports better engagement metrics and signals that modern AI‑enhanced ranking systems increasingly factor in.
Magento provides a basic layer of schema, but modern search and AI systems require richer, more complete product data. Enhanced product schema gives search engines precise information about what the product is, how it is priced, whether it is in stock, and what other attributes define it.
This matters because AI‑driven search experiences rely heavily on structured data to understand products as entities. Including fields like brand, GTIN, SKU, material, and size helps AI classify products correctly and match them to user intent.
Strong structured data improves eligibility for rich results, supports visibility in AI Overviews, and makes it easier for product info to be extracted, summarized, and compared across the web.
AI‑driven search platforms evaluate far more than keywords. They look for clarity, completeness, and consumer‑ready information. Systems like Google AI Overviews and Perplexity need clean specifications, descriptive language, review signals, and trustworthy product attributes to surface a product confidently. When Magento product pages include well‑structured attributes, FAQs, clear specifications, and real user feedback, AI models can better determine relevance and usefulness. This not only improves visibility in AI‑generated summaries but also increases the likelihood of being surfaced as a recommended product in conversational search flows.
The structure of your product URLs plays a significant role in crawl efficiency and clarity.
Magento allows both category‑based URLs and top‑level product URLs, but the latter is usually better for SEO and AI systems. Clean, stable URLs reduce duplication and consolidate ranking signals into one definitive version of the page. When URLs change based on category paths, search engines may split authority across multiple versions or waste crawl budget on unnecessary duplicates.
For AI search systems, predictable URLs make it easier to associate product data with a single entity across the web. Using top‑level URLs, supported by strong internal linking and accurate canonicals, helps ensure that both search engines and AI models reference the correct version of the product page.
Filters can easily create thousands of thin or duplicate pages. In 2026, the focus is not on hiding parameters but managing crawl paths and preserving essential category pages.
Some good best practices include:
The old Google Search Console parameter tool is deprecated. Handle parameters via:
Product Filters should not hide useful product attributes. AI systems still need to understand sizing, material, price, and availability.
Magento’s rewrite system is powerful but prone to creating duplicates if not managed carefully. Duplicate URLs dilute authority, create confusion for crawlers, and introduce unnecessary complexity for AI systems that depend on consistent signals. Issues like category paths reappearing, /catalog/ versions resurfacing, or numbered duplicates often stem from misconfigured rewrites or bulk product imports.
For SEO, duplicate paths waste crawl budget and risk indexing low‑quality or unintentional versions of a product page. For AI‑driven search, inconsistency makes it harder to map attributes, reviews, and pricing data to the correct canonical product. Regular rewrite table audits, strict redirect rules, and blocking system paths ensure search engines see only the correct version. Clean, predictable URL behavior is essential for long‑term organic stability.
With Google no longer using rel=next/prev, the emphasis has shifted toward clarity, crawlability, and consistent content signals. Each paginated page should have its own unique title and H1, so search engines understand that these pages represent distinct sections of a category, not duplicates. Self‑canonicals prevent incorrect consolidation while still allowing discovery of deeper product listings.
For infinite scroll implementations, providing paginated fallbacks ensures that Google and AI systems can access all products, not just the first batch loaded on scroll. Proper pagination protects category visibility, prevents orphaned products, and ensures that AI models can access a full and accurate representation of your catalog.
Adobe Commerce Page Builder (ACP) is becoming a central part of the Adobe Commerce ecosystem, offering a more streamlined and flexible way to manage content.
ACP could play a growing role in SEO and AI visibility because it supports cleaner markup, more consistent content structures, and modular components that search engines can interpret more easily. As AI-driven systems rely more on structured, reliable, and semantically organized content, ACP provides a foundation for producing consistent product pages, category templates, and merchandising blocks.
For merchants, ACP also reduces the risk of layout bloat since content blocks are standardized and optimized. This helps with performance and keeps Core Web Vitals healthy, a key factor for rankings and AI-driven discovery. Even if you cannot access ACP yet, planning for its adoption ensures your store remains future-ready.
The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is one of the most important emerging technologies for ecommerce, and Adobe Commerce merchants should begin preparing for its impact. Unlike Page Builder, this ACP refers to a protocol designed to help AI agents interact directly with online stores.
AI agents, such as those in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s agentic systems, will increasingly handle tasks like comparing products, checking availability, and completing purchases on behalf of users. The Agentic Commerce Protocol standardizes how product data, pricing, stock status, and checkout operations are communicated to these agents.
For SEO and AI visibility, ACP represents a major shift. It allows AI systems to:
For merchants, adopting ACP in the future means your products can be recommended, compared, and purchased through AI interfaces, not only through traditional search. Stores that implement ACP early will have a competitive advantage in AI‑driven discovery, especially as conversational shopping becomes normalized.
Even though ACP adoption is still developing, Adobe Commerce teams should begin preparing for:
ACP should be on your long‑term roadmap as it will shape how customers find and buy products in the next wave of AI‑powered commerce.
Magento/Adobe Commerce can be a high-performing platform for search when built with technical SEO in mind. The key is to set strong foundations, efficient crawl paths, fast performance, structured data, and clarity for both users and AI systems.
Whether you are building yourself or working with developers, use this guide as a framework to ensure your Adobe Commerce store is set up for organic success in 2026 and beyond.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Anton Vierietin/Shutterstock
I’m an experienced SEO with more than 12 years of experience in-house and within an agency. Within the agency, I’ve …
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