makeshop Not in Search: Four Checks

Questions from makeshop shops fall into two groups. One: after adding JSON-LD to product pages, the Rich Results Test detected two Product entries and reported an error. The other: the blog is updated every week, but the company's name never comes up in ChatGPT or Google AI Mode. The first is duplicate structured data output. The second is how blog operation (built-in or via the WordPress integration) connects to the shop.

Neither is makeshop's features getting in the way. The causes gather on the operator's side: adding markup without checking what the standard output already contains, never settling where the blog lives or how its sitemap is handled, and posts that don't lead to products. This article puts the four checks in order. Numbers and specifications come only from the individual articles on each topic.

1. Is the product page structured data being output twice

makeshop outputs JSON-LD as standard on Creator Mode product detail pages. If you add your own JSON-LD in Creator Mode on top of that, the same type appears twice on the same page. Validation tools can't decide which one is correct, so they report errors or warnings, and an error can cause the whole block to be ignored, leaving you worse off than before you added anything. A page with two of the same type is harder to handle than a page with none, so start by subtracting before you add.

There are two checks. Run the product page URL through the Rich Results Test and look at the list of detected types, then search the page source for application/ld+json and see whether it appears two or more times. To find where the standard output sits in the template, search for ld+json inside the Creator Mode template. Run the same check on category pages and the top page.

In most cases the right answer is to keep the standard output and delete what you added. The standard output follows product additions automatically and is maintained by makeshop. When its values disagree with the screen, don't overwrite the JSON-LD; fix the source product data (price, stock, product name). If the standard Product lacks attributes such as brand name or part number, don't add a whole second Product. Either disable the standard output and consolidate on your own JSON-LD, or keep the standard and give up the missing attributes. The switch is under Shop Setup > Settings > SEO/SNS/Marketing > Access-analytics tag settings (the admin labels are in Japanese). When you add a missing type, fill the values dynamically with Creator Mode's own tags, and after adding, re-verify on three kinds of product page: normal, out of stock, and with variants.

2. Is the blog placed under the shop

When you write posts in WordPress, the first decision is whether the blog sits under the shop or on a separate domain. Search engines accumulate performance per domain, so even when a good post on a separate-domain blog gets cited, the credit builds up on the blog's domain and barely flows to the shop's. Placed under the shop, post performance and product page performance stack on the same domain, and AI search finds it easier to relate posts and products within that domain.

Which placements makeshop's WordPress integration option allows is something to confirm in the official specifications; choose the one closest to the shop among those available. A subdomain is strictly a different hostname, but dense internal linking can get you close to the effect of a subdirectory. If you already run the blog on a separate domain with many posts and inbound links, a move requires URL redirects, so tighten internal links first and consider moving only if the effect falls short.

3. Are the blog and the shop read as one site

Whatever the placement, the requirements for having the blog and shop treated as one site are the same. Whether WordPress posts are included in makeshop's sitemap depends on the integration's specifications, so assume they aren't and register the WordPress sitemap in Search Console separately.

Put Article on posts. Product structured data lives on the product page, so don't put it on posts; a link from the post to the product page is enough. If you run the blog on more than one system, don't place the same content on both. Duplication splits performance. Decide roles ahead of time, such as announcements on one and buying guides on the other.

4. Are posts "answers that lead to a product"

AI search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode) doesn't pick sources by update frequency or word count. It looks at whether a paragraph answers the question directly, whether a machine can extract that paragraph cleanly, and whether the post clearly connects to products and categories on the site. If a post title is a question, write the answer right under the first H2; for existing posts, adding three or four sentences at the top is enough to change the structure. For comparison and buying-guide questions, tables are the format most likely to be cited, but a table pasted as an image is nothing but an image to AI. Put it in the body as an HTML table, and list three to five FAQs as short question-and-answer pairs drawn from real customer questions.

Of the five items, only the last is invisible from the makeshop admin panel. Whether bots are fetching posts can be known only from logs. Automatic JSON-LD output covers Creator Mode product detail pages, so verify Article and BreadcrumbList on the post side yourself with the Rich Results Test. There's no need to rewrite every post; narrow it to the 10 to 20 posts closest to products and start by adding the opening answer paragraph and internal links.

Search OS is the layer that keeps checking whether what you added is still correct today

Search OS continuously verifies structured data output for existing shops, including those on makeshop. It detects duplicate output, disagreement with the screen, and breakage after template changes, organizes them as fix items, and confirms from bot logs whether search engines and AI crawlers are actually fetching the pages. For sites built from several systems, like makeshop plus WordPress, it delivers metadata, structured data, sitemaps, and canonical as one separate layer and organizes broken internal links and duplicates as fix items. It doesn't do the adding for you, and it doesn't replace the blog.

Questions to check first

• When you run a product page through the Rich Results Test, is exactly one Product detected

• How many times does application/ld+json appear in the page source, and does each come from the standard template or from an addition

• Do the price, stock, and product name in the standard Product output match what the screen shows

• Is the blog under the same domain as the shop, and if it's on a separate domain, is internal linking dense

• Is the WordPress sitemap registered in Search Console separately from makeshop's sitemap

• Is there an answer to the question right under the first H2 of the top 10 posts closest to products

• Which is more recent: the day you changed the template, or the day you last re-verified

Conclusion

makeshop's standard output is a sufficient starting point for product pages, and the rule for structured data is to subtract before you add. Put the blog under the shop, register its sitemap separately, and turn posts into answers that lead to a product. In an experiment tracking 81 pages on a high-authority domain for 30 days, ChatGPT search citation coverage peaked at 42%, Google AI Mode fell from 59% in the first week to 26% on day 30, and pages of the same quality split into cited and uncited by structure alone. Before adding more posts, run through the four points above once.

Related reading

• Diagnosing and fixing duplicate structured data output when adding markup in makeshop Creator Mode

• makeshop and the WordPress integration: put the blog on a separate domain or under the shop

• Can a makeshop blog alone get picked up by AI search: what's missing and how to add it

References

• Google Search Central: Product structured data

• Google Search Central: General structured data guidelines

• Google: Rich Results Test

• Google Search Central: Build and submit a sitemap

• Google Search Central: Consolidate duplicate URLs

• Google Search Central: Article structured data