How to Find Shopify Stores That Need SEO: 5 Free Places to Look
Five free places to find Shopify stores that need SEO, how to confirm a store runs on Shopify from its public pages, and the prospect sheet to keep them in.
You can build a prospect list of Shopify stores without paying for a database. Pick one product category and work through five steps:
- Pick one product category: Write the search a shopper would type, plus two variations.
- Search the five places: The Meta Ad Library, Google results and Shopping ads, Shopify App Store reviews, Shop, and the free parts of BuiltWith and Store Leads.
- Confirm the store runs on Shopify: Look for cdn.shopify.com and a myshopify.com hostname in the page source, or run a free single-site lookup.
- Size the catalogue and get a first finding: Count the pages from the sitemap and run one free check on a product or collection page.
- Fill in the sheet and count the signals: Store, platform, category, where found, signals and a count. Sort by the count.
Twenty stores from one category is enough for a first list. Qualify the rows with three or more signals first.
Steps 1 to 3 need a browser and a spreadsheet. CrawlRaven comes in at step 4, where the free tools size a store's catalogue and surface a first finding, and again once a store becomes a client and you can join the crawl with their Search Console and GA4 data. Try CrawlRaven free for 7 days: 1 website, no credit card →
Online stores leave a public trail. Their ads sit in a library anyone can search, their Shopping ads show up when you search a product, and their owners write reviews of the apps they use. An agency can read all of that for free and know which stores already spend money on traffic.
The short version: to find Shopify stores that need SEO, pick one product category, search it in five free places, and list the stores that pay for ads but rank on page two or lower in the organic results. Twenty stores is enough for a first list.
Where to find Shopify stores and what each place tells you
| Place | What it shows | Free or paid | Signal to note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta Ad Library | Active ads for a keyword, with the advertiser and the date each ad started | Free to view and search | Paying for traffic in the category |
| Google results and Shopping ads | Which stores advertise for a category search and where they rank organically | Free | Advertises, ranks on page two or lower |
| Shopify App Store reviews | Store name, country and time using an SEO app | Free to read | Already cares about SEO |
| Shop (shop.app) | Stores selling a product, with rating counts and prices | Free to search | Listed by Shopify, has reviews |
| BuiltWith and Store Leads | The platform behind one site, and ranked lists of stores | Single lookups and previews free, full lists paid | Confirms the platform |
Free and paid notes follow each site's own pages, read on 11 October 2026.
The five places in the table are the Meta Ad Library, Google results and Shopping ads, Shopify App Store reviews, Shop, and two lookup tools, BuiltWith and Store Leads. The first four are free to search. The lookup tools are free for single lookups and previews, and their full lists are paid.
What makes a store a good SEO prospect
A long list of Shopify stores is easy to get. Store Leads' State of Shopify report counted 3,103,755 live Shopify stores when we read it on 11 October 2026. Most of them are too small to hire an agency, so the list has to be filtered as you build it.
I would look for three things in a store before adding it:
- It already pays for traffic. A store running ads has a marketing budget and someone who decides how to spend it.
- Its organic visibility is weak. It advertises for a category search and ranks on page two or lower for the same search.
- The catalogue is large enough to matter. More products and collections mean more pages that can rank, and more technical work to sell.
Google Ads data for the US, read on 11 October 2026, shows 170 searches a month for “how to find shopify stores” and 110 for “list of shopify stores”. The live Google results for “find shopify stores” that day were written for shoppers, dropshippers and app vendors. This guide is for an agency building a prospect list.
Step 1: Pick one product category
Keep the first list to one category. Stores in the same category compete for the same searches, so you can compare them fairly and reuse what you learn from one store on the next.
- Choose a category you can describe in two or three words, such as a type of pet product or a type of skincare.
- Write the search a shopper would type to buy it.
- Write two variations, such as a material, a size or a use case.
- Open a spreadsheet with six columns: store, platform, category, where found, signals and count.
Step 2: Search the five places
Run your category search in each place below and add every relevant store to the sheet. Write down where you found it and what you saw. A store that turns up in two or three places is worth a closer look.
Place 1: The Meta Ad Library
Meta's help page says the Ad Library contains all active ads shown across Meta technologies and that anyone can view and search it. You can search for any term, name or Page.
We searched a product keyword for the United States on 11 October 2026. Each result showed these details:
- The advertiser's name
- An Active status
- The date the ad started running
- The platforms it runs on
- The ad text, often with the store's domain
What it tells you: the store pays for traffic in this category today. An ad that started months ago and is still active tells you the store has kept paying for it. Note the start date in the signals column.
Place 2: Google results and Shopping ads
Search your category on Google. Google Ads Help says Shopping ads display a product photo, title, price and store name, and can appear on Google Search next to the search results and on the Shopping tab. That gives you a list of stores paying for this exact search.
- Write down each store name shown in the Shopping ads.
- Read the organic results on pages one and two and note where each of those stores appears, if at all.
- Add the stores that advertise and rank on page two or lower. Add any other store you find on page two as well.
- To confirm a store advertises on Google, look it up in the Google Ads Transparency Center.
Google describes the Ads Transparency Center as a searchable repository of advertisers and the ads they have served on platforms like Search, Display, Gmail and YouTube. You search by advertiser or website name and can filter by date and location.
What it tells you: the store pays for clicks on a search where its organic traffic is low. That gap is the opening line of a pitch.
Place 3: Shopify App Store review pages
Every app on the Shopify App Store has a public reviews page. We opened the reviews page for Plug in SEO on 11 October 2026. It listed 674 reviews, and each one showed the store name, the country and how long the store had used the app.
Read the reviews of two or three SEO apps and apps close to SEO, such as speed or schema apps. Our guide to Shopify SEO apps lists the main ones.
- The store is on Shopify. The review also shows how long it has used the app.
- The owner cares about SEO. They installed an app for it and took time to write about it.
- The review often names the problem. A review that describes an unsolved SEO issue gives you a topic for your first message.
Place 4: Shop and niche directories
Shop is Shopify's own shopping site and app. Shopify's help page calls it a shopping destination available on the web, and says a store that meets the Shop Merchant Guidelines is listed automatically with its products.
We searched a product keyword on Shop without signing in. The results showed the store name, the product, a rating count and a price for each item. A store that appears there is very likely a Shopify merchant, and a rating count in the hundreds or thousands shows it has real customers.
Niche directories work the same way. Marketplaces, gift guides and trade association member lists in your category name brands that sell online. Add the ones with their own store to the sheet and confirm the platform in step 3.
Place 5: BuiltWith and Store Leads
These are technology lookup tools. Both sell lists of stores by platform, and both have a free part that is useful here. This is what their own pages said on 11 October 2026:
- BuiltWith, free: its plans page says BuiltWith is free to use for individual site lookups forever. We looked up one store and the profile's eCommerce section named Shopify without a login.
- BuiltWith, paid: the plans are Basic at $295 a month, Pro at $495 and Team at $995.
- Store Leads, free: a free account gives a limited preview. Its State of Shopify report pages are free to read and showed five top stores and five new stores per category.
- Store Leads, paid: Premium is $75 a month with 2,000 searches, Pro is $250 and adds CSV export, Elite is $450 and Enterprise is $950. The site says a complete list of Shopify stores needs a paid account.
Store Leads says it tracks 13,760,654 active stores across 416 ecommerce platforms. For a first list of twenty, the free parts are enough. Use BuiltWith to confirm a platform and the Store Leads report to see the top-ranked stores in a category.
Step 3: Confirm the store runs on Shopify
Some stores on your sheet will run on other platforms. You can check the platform from the store's public home page.
- Open the store's home page and view the page source.
- Search the source for
cdn.shopify.com. The Shopify stores we checked loaded their assets from that address. - Search the source for
myshopify.com. The stores we checked each had a hostname ending in it. - If you want a second opinion, enter the domain on BuiltWith and read the eCommerce section.
To test this, we fetched the home pages of three known Shopify stores on 11 October 2026: allbirds.com, gymshark.com and deathwishcoffee.com. All three contained cdn.shopify.com asset URLs and a hostname ending in myshopify.com. Two of the three also returned a powered-by: Shopify response header.
The raw HTML a browser receives for a page. In most desktop browsers you can right-click the page and choose View Page Source, then use the find command to search it.
Write the platform in the sheet. If the store runs on WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Magento, keep the row. The same signals apply, and only the Shopify-specific checks in step 4 change.
Step 4: Size the catalogue and get a first finding
Before a store is a client you have no access to its Search Console or GA4. A crawl and four free tools still tell you how big the store is and whether it has a problem you can name.
- Website page counter: enter the domain and get the page count from the XML sitemap, broken down by section.
- Sitemap extractor: pull every URL from the sitemap to see how many products, collections and blog posts the store has.
- Shopify duplicate URL checker: samples 20 products and checks that the collection-path copy and the variant URL point to the plain product URL with a canonical tag.
- Collection page SEO checker: runs 13 checks on one collection URL, including the title, the category copy word count and the schema.
Write the page count and one finding in the signals column. A store with over a thousand pages and a collection page with no copy is a stronger row than a store with forty pages and no findings.
I would run the collection page check on the exact category you searched in step 2. If the store pays for a Shopping ad on that search and its collection page for the same products has no copy, you have the ad, the ranking and the cause in one row.
Step 5: Fill in the sheet and count the signals
Give each store one point for each signal you found, then sort by the count. These are the six signals I would count:
- An active Meta ad in the category
- A Google Shopping or search ad for the category search
- An organic ranking on page two or lower for that search
- A review of an SEO app, or an SEO app in use
- A catalogue of several hundred pages or more
- A named finding from one of the free checks
One row per store, sorted by signal count
| Store | Platform | Category | Where found | Signals | Count |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Store A | Shopify | Dog harnesses | Meta Ad Library | Ad active for months, Shopping ad, organic page two, 1,200 pages | 4 |
| Store B | Shopify | Dog harnesses | Google Shopping ad | Shopping ad, organic page two, collection page has no copy | 3 |
| Store C | Shopify | Dog harnesses | App Store review | Uses an SEO app, organic page two | 2 |
| Store D | Shopify | Dog harnesses | Shop | Organic page two, 40 pages | 1 |
Illustration with placeholder names and numbers. Qualify the rows with a count of 3 or more first.
The example sheet above has four rows, all Shopify stores in one category:
- Store A, found in the Meta Ad Library: an ad active for months, a Shopping ad, an organic ranking on page two and 1,200 pages. Count of 4.
- Store B, found in a Google Shopping ad: a Shopping ad, an organic ranking on page two and a collection page with no copy. Count of 3.
- Store C, found in an App Store review: uses an SEO app and ranks on page two. Count of 2.
- Store D, found on Shop: ranks on page two and has 40 pages. Count of 1.
Stores A and B go first. Each row already holds the facts for an opening line: what the store pays for, where it ranks and one thing on the site that explains the gap.
What to do once the list is built
The list is the first of three stages. Each store with three or more signals moves on to qualifying, and the ones that pass get a pitch.
From list to qualify to pitch
What happens to each row on the sheet
Search one product category in the five places and add each store you find to the sheet, with where you found it.
View the page source for cdn.shopify.com and a myshopify.com hostname, or run a free single-site lookup.
Count the pages from the sitemap and run one free check on a product or collection page to get a first finding.
Count the signals, sort the sheet, and qualify the rows with three or more before you spend time on a pitch.
Crawl the store, pick three findings, and send them to the right person with one question.
Steps 1 to 3 are this post. Steps 4 and 5 each have their own guide.
- Qualify. Check that the store is large enough and active enough to pay for SEO, using the checks for qualifying an ecommerce SEO prospect.
- Pitch. Crawl the store and send a three-finding store teardown.
- Add evidence. Test which brands AI assistants recommend for the category with the AI shopping test.
- Reach the right person. Find the founder or the head of marketing with Apollo for ecommerce SEO outreach.
Should you buy or scrape a list of Shopify stores?
I would build the first list by hand. A paid export gives you thousands of domains and no reason to contact any of them. Twenty stores you have looked at closely give you twenty specific openings.
A paid database makes sense later, when you know which category and store size convert for you and want more of the same. I would leave scraping tools out of this. Every place in this post can be read in a browser, one search at a time.
Tools that make this faster
- A browser and a spreadsheet. Enough for steps 1 to 3.
- CrawlRaven. Our tool. It crawls a store on your list for pages with no internal links, crawler access, rendering and schema errors. After the store signs and grants access, it ranks content opportunities from search evidence and saved priorities, and runs a separate technical audit. See the ecommerce SEO audit.
- Free checks. The four tools in step 4, plus the Shopify app script checker for stores that load many app scripts.
We are also launching an AI SEO tool soon. Join the waitlist to hear when it opens.
Sources used in this post
All sources were opened and read on 11 October 2026.
- Meta Business Help Center – About the Meta Ad Library: what the library contains and who can search it. We also ran a keyword search in the Ad Library to see what each result shows.
- Google Ads Help – About Shopping ads: what a Shopping ad displays and where it appears.
- Google Advertising Policies Help – Ads transparency: the description of the Ads Transparency Center, its search and its filters.
- Shopify App Store – Plug in SEO reviews: the review count and the details shown on each review.
- Shopify Help Center – Shop: what Shop is and how stores get listed. We also ran a product search on shop.app.
- BuiltWith – Plans: free individual site lookups and paid plan prices.
- Store Leads – home page and pricing and State of Shopify report: store and platform counts, plan prices, and what is free.
- Our own check: the home pages of allbirds.com, gymshark.com and deathwishcoffee.com, fetched to confirm the Shopify markers in step 3.
- Search volumes are Google Ads data for the US from DataForSEO. The search results for “find shopify stores” are the live US Google results.
Related reading on CrawlRaven
- Shopify SEO, for what the platform gets right by default and what needs work.
- Shopify canonicals and duplicate content, for the finding the duplicate URL checker looks for.
- Category page SEO and product page SEO, for what a strong collection and product page contain.
- Technical SEO for ecommerce, for the full crawl checklist after the first call.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find Shopify stores that need SEO?
Pick one product category and search it in five free places: the Meta Ad Library, Google results and Shopping ads, Shopify App Store review pages, Shop, and the free parts of BuiltWith and Store Leads. Add each store to a sheet with the signals you saw, such as an active ad and an organic ranking on page two. Qualify the stores with three or more signals first.
Is there a free list of Shopify stores?
There is no complete free list. Store Leads publishes a free State of Shopify report that showed five top stores and five new stores per category when we read it on 11 October 2026, and says a complete list needs a paid account. Shop, Shopify's own shopping site, lets you search products and see the stores that sell them without signing in.
How can I tell if a website runs on Shopify?
View the page source and search for cdn.shopify.com and for a hostname ending in myshopify.com. On 11 October 2026 we fetched the home pages of three known Shopify stores and found both in all three. You can also enter the domain on BuiltWith, which says individual site lookups are free, and read the eCommerce section of the profile.
Is the Meta Ad Library free to use?
Yes. Meta's help page says anyone can view and search the Ad Library, and that it contains all active ads shown across Meta technologies. You can search for any term, name or Page. For prospecting, search a product category and note which stores have active ads and when each ad started running.
Is BuiltWith free for finding Shopify stores?
Partly. BuiltWith's plans page says it is free to use for individual site lookups forever, so you can confirm the platform of one store at a time at no cost. Lists of sites by technology sit in its paid plans, which the same page priced from $295 a month for Basic on 11 October 2026.
How much does Store Leads cost?
On 11 October 2026 the Store Leads site listed four plans: Premium at $75 a month, Pro at $250, Elite at $450 and Enterprise at $950. CSV export starts on the Pro plan. A free account gives what the site calls a limited preview, and its State of Shopify report pages are free to read.
How many stores should be on an ecommerce SEO prospect list?
Start with about twenty stores from one product category. That is small enough to check by hand and large enough to leave several stores with three or more signals. Add a second category once you have worked through the first list.
What do I do after I have the list of stores?
Qualify the stores with the highest signal counts, then pitch the ones that pass. Qualifying means checking that the store is large enough and active enough to pay for SEO. The pitch is a short technical teardown with three findings from a crawl of the store, sent to the person who owns marketing.
15+ years of growing SaaS websites through SEO | Author, 200-Point Audit Checklist
Aditi has spent 15+ years helping SaaS companies scale organic traffic through technical SEO and content strategy. She is the author of the CrawlRaven 200-Point Audit checklist used by agencies and in-house teams to systematically improve search performance.