Magento gives you more SEO control than any other platform here. It also ships using almost none of it, which is why a fresh store starts behind. Here is the mechanism, and what the benchmark shows.
Magento has a reputation as the platform serious merchants graduate to, and on SEO that reputation is earned: it exposes more search controls than any of the hosted platforms. Canonical handling, URL rewrites, meta templating, sitemaps, structured data, per-store configuration. The tools are all there.
So it is worth sitting with the benchmark result. Across 20,000 Magento stores, Magento came last of the four platforms on the SEO signals we measured. 69.52% of Magento stores were clean on those checks, behind Shopware, Shopify, and PrestaShop. The platform with the deepest SEO toolbox produced the lowest share of clean stores. That is not a contradiction once you see what is actually going on.
Magento isn’t weak at SEO. Default Magento is.
The hosted platforms do your technical SEO whether you ask them to or not. Shopify generates a sitemap, writes a robots file, and sets canonical tags on a new store before you touch anything. Magento takes the opposite approach: it hands you the controls and leaves them switched off until you configure them. Power, in exchange for the assumption that someone will use it.
Out of the box, that assumption often does not hold. Take canonical tags, the markup that tells search engines which version of a page is the real one. Magento ships the canonical settings for categories and products switched off by default, so a new store runs without them until someone goes into the configuration and turns them on. Layered navigation, filters, and sort parameters then generate a wide spread of crawlable URLs with nothing pointing search engines back to the canonical page. Turning canonicals on consolidates which version gets indexed, but those parameter URLs still get crawled, so reining them in is a separate job, not something the canonical setting finishes on its own. There is a subtler default underneath, too: once category canonicals are on, Magento points the paginated pages of a category, page two and beyond, back to page one, which can keep products that appear only deeper in a category out of the index. That much is mechanism, not a figure the benchmark counted. The XML sitemap is the same story: Magento does not produce one until you create it and schedule it to regenerate, and even then it stays current only if the store’s cron jobs are actually running, where a hosted platform simply keeps one fresh for you. None of this is missing from Magento. It is waiting to be switched on.
The structured data gap the benchmark caught
The clearest measured example is structured data, the markup that makes a product eligible for the richer search results with prices, availability, and policies attached. In core Magento this depends on the theme and on extensions rather than the platform, and it shows. Across the Magento stores we audited, 61% were missing return-policy structured data, more than 12,000 stores without the markup that a returns-aware result is built from. That is the highest rate of any platform in the study on this signal.
It is the same pattern as the canonical settings, in a different place: a capability Magento supports, left unconfigured on most stores, because nothing turns it on automatically. The structured data guide covers what should be present and how to check it.
The flip side, which is the reason to bother
Here is the part that makes the work worth it. Because Magento’s SEO is all configuration rather than fixed defaults, the ceiling is higher than on the locked-down platforms. A Magento store that has its canonicals on, its sitemap scheduled, its structured data complete, and its URL handling deliberate can out-rank stores on platforms that never let you reach into those settings at all. The lowest out-of-the-box score is a statement about defaults, not about what the platform can do. Magento underperforms when it is left alone and overperforms when it is set up, and most stores in the benchmark were closer to the first state than the second.
That also means a low score is not a verdict on the platform choice. It is a list of switches that have not been flipped yet.
What to actually check
- whether canonical tags are enabled for categories and products, rather than left at the default (the SEO guide covers the wider set);
- whether an XML sitemap exists, regenerates on a schedule, and has been submitted to search engines (ecommerce sitemaps);
- whether product and return-policy structured data is actually present, rather than assumed because a theme “should” add it;
- whether layered-navigation and filter URLs are being left crawlable and indexable when they should not be;
- whether product and category meta titles and descriptions are written, rather than sitting on Magento’s generic defaults (page titles for search).
The same SEO checks that placed Magento last in the benchmark, at 69.52%, run on a single store, and they show which of Magento’s controls are still switched off on yours. Magento gives you the deepest SEO toolbox of any platform here. The only question a scan answers is how much of it your store is actually using. For the platform’s wider pattern, the Magento speed piece tells the same story on performance, and the 2026 benchmark has the full table.