September 6, 2026 · 6 min read
How to Read Your Shop Audit Score
Shop Audit's 100-point score is really four separate scores added together — and one of them is the same real Listing Grade data as your catalog, not a separate AI guess.
Shop Audit's overall score out of 100 is really four component scores, added together: Listing Optimization (up to 40 points), Trust (up to 25), Catalog (up to 20), and Policies (up to 15). Knowing which of the four is dragging the total down matters more than the total itself — a shop with weak Trust but a strong catalog needs a completely different fix than the reverse.
Listing Optimization — the one that's fully deterministic
This component isn't a separate AI opinion about your shop — it's the real average of your own catalog's actual Listing Grades, the same rubric covered in how to read a Listing Grade score, scaled to 40 points. Reoptimize a handful of your weakest-graded listings with AI Listing Helper, and this exact number moves, because it's reading the same real grades, not a static snapshot.
Trust, Catalog, and Policies — real facts, AI-evaluated
These three are evaluated by AI, but only from real, stated facts: your shop's actual age, review count and average rating, favoriter count, the real spread of your active listings' prices, and your actual shipping/refund/payment policy text. The model is explicitly instructed to report only genuine issues it can point to in those real facts — never a generic filler complaint invented to make the list look thorough.
A brand-new shop with zero reviews doesn't get penalized as "Poor" for it — Shop Audit marks a shop with no review history yet as "New" instead, since a low Trust score from having no reviews is an expected fact of being new, not evidence of a problem.
Why the score can change without you doing anything to your listings
Shop Audit caches its result until you either hit Refresh yourself or reoptimize a listing — which invalidates the cache automatically so the next time you view it, it recomputes with your shop's current real state rather than showing a stale score from before the change. If you haven't touched anything and the number looks the same as last time, that's the cache working as intended, not a sign it's stuck.