About the duplicate content reports
How these reports are built, and why duplicate copy matters
Optaru reads publicly accessible product pages and compares the text on them. When the same 15-to-30-word sentence turns up word for word on storefronts that have nothing to do with one another, we record it as a finding. Each report counts and quotes that finding — it never names a seller.
How detection works
Every Shopify storefront publishes the same catalogue data its own theme reads. We request it once per store, rate-limited, and read nothing behind a login or a paywall. From each catalogue we take the product descriptions, normalize the text, and index every sentence of 15 to 30 words. A sentence that appears on two or more unrelated stores becomes a cluster, and a cluster of four or more storefronts can become one of these reports.
The store names behind a cluster are used only to count how many distinct storefronts share the text, and are then discarded. They are never stored on a report and never published.
Why duplicate descriptions matter
Search engines do not hand out a “duplicate content penalty.” What they do is quieter and just as costly: they group near-identical pages and typically surface only one of them. If your product description is shared with a dozen competitors, you are in a lottery for a single slot — and the page that gets shown is rarely the newest, smallest store.
AI answer engines behave the same way, and the stakes are higher. When someone asks an assistant for a recommendation in your category, it needs text that says something specific about your product. Supplier copy says the same specific thing about a dozen stores at once, so it identifies none of them. Text that appears everywhere carries nothing specific to quote.
The fix is not a rewrite of a few words. It is a description that says something about the product only you can say — what it is, who it is for, and the specifics no supplier sheet contains. That is exactly what Optaru writes.
Our commitments
- No store is ever named. No report carries a store name, a domain, a URL or a screenshot. The data behind them does not store that, by design.
- Neutral by default. A report says a sentence appears on N storefronts. It makes no claim about who wrote it first or who copied whom — both stores may have received it from the same supplier.
- Removal on request. Every report has a removal link. You do not need to prove ownership of the text to ask for a page to be taken down.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly do these reports show?
Each report is one product description that Optaru found published, word for word, on many unrelated online stores. It shows a short excerpt of that text, how many places it was found, the countries involved, the price span it was sold at, and — where the scan supports it — what the underlying data looks like across those stores.
Why do you not name the stores?
Because naming them would serve no one. The point is that the text is shared, not that any particular seller is at fault — most sellers received the description from a supplier and had no idea it was used elsewhere. Store names, domains and links are not collected for these pages and are never published.
Why does the same description end up on so many stores?
Suppliers, dropshipping catalogues and marketplace listings hand sellers a ready-made description, and it gets pasted in unchanged. Every store that imports the same catalogue ends up publishing the same paragraph.
Does duplicate content get my store penalized by Google?
No — there is no duplicate content penalty in the sense of a manual punishment. What happens is quieter: Google groups near-identical pages together and typically shows only one of them in results. If dozens of stores share your description, the page that gets shown is usually not the smallest store.
How was this detected?
By reading publicly accessible product pages the same way any visitor would — the same /products.json endpoint the store's own theme reads — then comparing the normalized text. No store was connected, no login was used, and no private data was accessed.
How do I fix it for my own store?
Replace the supplier text with a description written around your actual product — what it is, who it is for, and the specifics only you can state. Optaru does this in one step and also produces the SEO and AI-search structure around it. The free plan covers 3 complete products.
This is my text. Can it be taken down?
Yes. Use the removal link at the bottom of any report and the page will be taken down. You do not need to prove ownership of the text to ask.
Browse the duplicate content reports
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