Content Quality
How Cassian AI™ reads and evaluates your store's written content — Layer 2 of the Cassian Score™.
Content Quality
Content Quality is the second layer of your Cassian Score™, accounting for 25% of the total. Cassian AI™ reads the actual text on every crawled page of your store and evaluates it for quality, completeness, and clarity.
This isn't a keyword tool. Cassian isn't looking for missing keywords or search density metrics. It's reading your store the way a thoughtful visitor would, and flagging content that is likely to confuse, underwhelm, or lose customers.
What Cassian AI evaluates
Spelling and grammar
Cassian AI reads every piece of visible text on crawled pages — product titles, product descriptions, collection page copy, page content, and blog posts — and flags spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and punctuation issues.
A typo in a product title is more than a cosmetic problem. Customers notice. Studies consistently show that spelling errors reduce purchase intent, particularly on higher-priced products where trust matters most.
What gets checked:
- Product titles and descriptions
- Collection page headlines and body copy
- Standard content pages (About, FAQs, Shipping, Returns)
- Blog posts
What Cassian is careful about:
- Brand names, proper nouns, and deliberate stylistic choices are unlikely to be flagged as errors
- Technical product terminology is context-aware
- British vs American English spelling differences don't generate errors — Cassian identifies the variant in use and applies it consistently
Where to fix: Issues → filter by Content → look for "Spelling" or "Grammar" issues. Each issue links directly to the affected page. Fix in your Shopify admin (Products → your product → Description, or Pages → your page).
Thin content
Product pages with very short or absent descriptions are flagged as thin content. Cassian uses approximately 150 words of meaningful prose as its threshold — this is a guideline, not a hard cutoff.
Why this matters: Thin product descriptions hurt both conversion rates (customers have less information to make a purchase decision) and search rankings (search engines treat very short pages as lower-quality content). Shopify stores that import catalogues from suppliers frequently inherit thin descriptions that were written for a trade catalogue, not a consumer storefront.
What counts as content: Meaningful prose — sentences that describe the product, its benefits, its use cases. What doesn't count:
- Tables of technical specifications
- Bullet lists of attributes (though these are useful to include alongside prose)
- Variant names (size, colour)
- Shipping information
- Legal disclaimers
The aim is a product description that could stand alone as a compelling, informative paragraph — not just a list of facts.
Where to fix: Issues → filter by Content → look for "Thin content" or "Missing description" issues. Expand each issue to see the affected product. Aim for at least one introductory paragraph (150+ words) before your spec table or bullet list.
For large catalogues with many thin descriptions, consider prioritising your best-selling products first. A high-traffic product with a thin description is costing you more than a low-traffic product with the same issue.
Duplicate content
Cassian identifies product descriptions that are identical or near-identical across multiple pages. This is common when:
- Multiple product variants share a description
- Products are imported from a supplier's feed with shared boilerplate descriptions
- A product appears in multiple collections with different URLs but the same underlying description
Why it matters: Search engines may consolidate duplicate pages and only rank one of them, suppressing others from appearing in search results. For customers, seeing the exact same description on ten products signals that the store hasn't invested in its content.
What Cassian looks for: Not just exact copies — near-duplicates that share 80%+ of their text are also flagged, even if a few words are changed.
Where to fix: Each duplicate group is listed in the Issues panel. You'll need to write unique descriptions for each product. Even small meaningful differences — different use cases highlighted, different customer audiences addressed — significantly reduce the duplicate signal.
Heading structure
Cassian validates the heading hierarchy on every crawled page. The rules:
- Every page should have exactly one H1 tag. In Shopify, most themes assign the product title or page title as H1 automatically. Don't add a second H1 in your description body.
- H2 and H3 should be used in logical order. Don't jump from H1 to H3, skipping H2.
- Avoid using headings purely for styling. If you want large text, use bold or increase font size via custom styling — don't use an H2 just because it looks big.
What Cassian flags:
- Missing H1 on a page
- Multiple H1 tags on a single page
- Heading hierarchy that skips levels (H1 → H3)
Where to fix: In Shopify's rich text editor, heading levels are available in the format dropdown. Review the affected pages listed in the Issues panel and check the heading structure in your description body.
Readability and clarity
Cassian AI flags content that reads as unusually complex or uses jargon inconsistent with an e-commerce context. This check is intentionally conservative — Cassian won't flag technical terminology on a specialised product page, but will flag content that appears to have been written for an internal audience or uses unusually convoluted sentence structures.
This check is contextual: Cassian understands that a fishing tackle store will use different language than a children's clothing store.
What Cassian flags:
- Sentence structures that are difficult to parse
- Jargon that doesn't match the apparent audience
- Content that reads as written for a B2B audience on a B2C store (or vice versa)
Readability flags are typically Medium or Low severity. They won't tank your score, but they're worth reviewing — clear, approachable copy converts better than technically accurate but impenetrable prose.
FAQ suitability
If your store has FAQ sections — on a dedicated FAQ page, on product pages, or on collection pages — Cassian evaluates whether the content is structured and written in a way likely to surface in AI-generated search answers.
This check overlaps with LLM Readiness, but it focuses on the content quality side: are the questions phrased clearly? Are the answers complete and self-contained? Is the FAQ marked up with the appropriate heading structure?
Content that works best as FAQ material: complete question and answer pairs, written in plain language, where the answer makes sense without reading the question first.
How Cassian AI reads your content
Cassian AI reads your pages the way a visitor would — it sees the rendered text content, not your source HTML. This means:
- Content inside custom HTML that isn't rendered in the browser may not be evaluated
- Content loaded via JavaScript after page render may be partially or not captured (depending on your store's implementation)
- Popups, drawers, and modals that require user interaction to open are generally not evaluated
Most Shopify stores render their content server-side, so this isn't usually a concern. If your store uses a headless setup or heavy client-side rendering, some content may be less visible to Cassian AI.
Where to see Content Quality results
- Issues page → filter by "Content" category. All content issues listed by severity.
- Scans page → click any scan → Content Quality section shows your layer score and all issues found.
- Dashboard overview → the Content Quality card shows your current layer score.
Common questions
Does Cassian check blog posts? Yes. All crawled pages are analysed, including blog posts and blog index pages. Blog content is included in the spelling, grammar, and heading structure checks.
Why is my product description flagged as thin when it seems long enough? Cassian counts prose — sentences that describe and explain. Spec tables, attribute bullet lists, and dimension data don't count toward the content threshold. If your "description" is mostly a specs table with a one-line intro, it will likely be flagged. Add a proper description paragraph above the specs.
Can I mark an issue as intentional and stop it affecting my score? Yes — dismiss the issue from either the Issues page or directly from a scan detail page. A dismissed issue is removed from the active count and excluded from score calculations. Use this for cases where a flagged pattern is a deliberate style choice rather than an error.
My store is set up in Australian English — will Cassian flag "colour" as a spelling error? No. Cassian identifies your store's language variant (British/Australian vs American English) and evaluates accordingly. Deliberately chosen spelling conventions won't be flagged.
I have thousands of products — do I need to fix all the thin content issues? Start with your highest-traffic products. The Issues page lists all affected products — sort by the severity level and prioritise the Critical and High items first. Low severity thin content issues (products with descriptions just below the threshold) can be addressed over time.
Cassian flagged a duplicate description but the products are genuinely similar — what should I do? Even similar products can have slightly different descriptions that emphasise different use cases, audiences, or features. Alternatively, if one product is clearly the canonical version, use canonical tags in your theme to tell search engines which page to treat as the primary. Contact support if you need guidance on the canonical tag approach.