Collection audit

Find and fix empty collections, thin descriptions, missing banners and stale pages.

Collection pages are often the weakest part of a catalogue. They rank, they get linked, they are what a shopper lands on from a category search — and they typically have no description, no banner alt text and no SEO fields, because Shopify does not require any of them.

The Collections page runs the same kind of audit as Products, against your collections.

📸 Screenshot needed — the Collections page with check tabs and a collection list showing thumbnails.

The checks

Check	Severity	Flagged when
Empty Collections	Critical	The collection contains no products
No Description	Critical	No description at all
Short Description	Warning	Under 100 characters of actual text
No Banner Image	Warning	No banner image set
Missing Banner Alt Text	Warning	A banner image exists but has no alt text
Missing SEO Title	Warning	No SEO title set
Missing Meta Description	Warning	No meta description set
Stale	Warning	Not updated in over 90 days

Empty collections

An empty collection is a dead end — a shopper clicks through from your navigation and finds nothing. It usually means an automated collection's conditions no longer match anything, or a seasonal collection that has sold through.

The app cannot fix this for you; it surfaces them so you can either restock, adjust the collection's conditions, or remove it from your navigation.

Stale collections

Anything untouched for more than 90 days. Not necessarily a problem — an evergreen collection can be correct and old. It is a prompt to check whether the banner still shows last season's campaign and whether the copy still describes what is actually in there.

Fixing collections

Descriptions, banner alt text and SEO fields are all generated the same way as on products: select collections, Suggest Selected, review, accept.

Collection descriptions get special treatment. Rather than writing from the collection title alone, Product Pelican first looks at what is actually in the collection — the brands, product types, available options and price range of its products, plus how the collection sits in your store navigation and which other collections relate to it. The description is then grounded in those facts, so it describes the real assortment instead of producing generic marketing copy.

This analysis is cached for a day. A bulk run over many collections reuses the same store-level data rather than recomputing it per collection. The cache clears automatically when a collection is edited or deleted, so a description generated right after you change a collection reflects the change.

Banner images can also be uploaded directly from the audit page for collections missing one.

Working through the page

The flow matches the product audit:

1. Pick a check tab.

2. Switch between Affected (only collections failing this check) and All.

3. Select collections.

4. Suggest Selected, review, then accept individually or in bulk.

Related pages

• Product audit — the same workflow for products.

• AI prompts — collection description, alt text and SEO prompts are separately editable.

• Merchandising rulesets — control the order products appear in inside a collection.