The short answer
Every major platform can rank. None of them ranks you for you. If you are choosing a platform mainly because of SEO, the honest answer is that the gap between the major ones is smaller than the gap between a store that does the work and a store that does not.
That does not mean the choice is meaningless. Platforms differ in how much they hand you by default, how much you can change, and how much of the technical upkeep falls on you. Those differences are worth knowing, and this page lays them out without taking sides.
If part of your reason for asking is that you are working out who should do the SEO once you have a platform, our guide to the four kinds of help you can hire for a store sets out what each kind does and where each one stops.
Pick the platform for your catalog, your team and your budget. Then judge it by whether it lets you do the SEO work, not by a claim that it does the work for you.
What a store needs from a platform
Before comparing names, it helps to know what you are comparing against. Search engines and AI assistants need a store to do a handful of plain things. A platform is good for SEO to the degree that it makes these easy.
- Editable titles and descriptions on every product, collection and page, not just the homepage.
- Clean, readable URLs that you can control, with the product or category name in them.
- Canonical tags so that one product reachable by several paths is treated as one page.
- An automatic XML sitemap that updates when products are added or removed. See what a sitemap does if the term is new.
- Redirects you can set yourself, so a renamed or deleted product does not become a dead end.
- Structured data for products, so prices, availability and reviews can be read by machines.
- Reasonable speed on a phone, including the theme and any apps or plugins you add.
- Room to write: a blog, long collection descriptions, and the ability to add content that is not a product.
Every platform in the next section can do most of this. The differences are in how far you can go without a developer, and in how much is switched on before you touch anything.
The five platforms in plain terms
These are general, checkable facts rather than rankings. Features change, so check current documentation before you decide.
Shopify
A hosted platform. Products live at /products/ URLs and collections at /collections/ URLs. Shopify generates a sitemap and a robots file for you, lets you edit titles, descriptions and redirects in the admin, and adds product structured data through most themes. Because it is hosted, speed and uptime are largely handled for you, though the theme and apps you install still affect speed. Our guide to hiring a Shopify SEO expert goes into the platform-specific work.
WooCommerce
A plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. You own the hosting, which means you also own speed, security and updates. In return you get a great deal of control over URLs, templates and the whole site, and WordPress has a long history of SEO plugins. The WooCommerce SEO services page covers what the work looks like there.
Wix
A hosted builder with SEO settings built into the editor, including per-page titles, descriptions and URL controls, and a guided setup checklist. It suits owners who want one place to manage the site without touching code. Details are in our Wix SEO expert guide.
BigCommerce
A hosted platform aimed at growing and larger catalogs, with editable URLs, redirects and sitemap support, and an approach that works well when a store is connected to a separate front end. Teams with a developer often like the flexibility.
Squarespace
A hosted site builder with built-in SEO fields, a clean template system and a simpler commerce feature set. It tends to fit smaller catalogs where design and simplicity matter more than deep merchandising controls.
What the platform actually decides
Look back at the list in the previous section. The platform decides whether each item is available, how easy it is, and what the default looks like. That is the floor.
A hosted platform sets a higher floor for owners who do not want to manage servers. An open platform raises the ceiling for owners who have someone to manage it. A builder with guided settings lowers the effort of the basics. None of these is better in the abstract. They are better or worse for a particular owner.
Here is where a platform really can hold you back. If you cannot edit a title, cannot set a redirect, cannot control a canonical tag, or cannot add a page that is not a product, you are limited in ways no amount of effort fixes. The major platforms above all let you do these things, which is why the choice rarely decides a store's results on its own.
What the platform does not decide is everything on the other side of the diagram: what your pages say, how they connect, and how often you add to them. Those are decided by whoever does the work, and they are where most of the difference between two stores comes from.
Where the differences show up in practice
Four places, in the order store owners tend to feel them.
Duplicate paths to one product. Some platforms can reach the same product through more than one URL, for example through a collection path and a direct path. The standard fix is a canonical tag pointing to one version. Most platforms add this for you, but it is worth confirming on your own store. Our glossary entry on the canonical URL explains the tag.
Speed. Hosted platforms handle servers, but themes, apps and plugins add weight on every platform. A store with many installed add-ons can be slow anywhere. The platform gives you a starting point, and your choices decide where you end up.
Control over templates. If you want to change how a category page is laid out, add a block of buying advice above the products, or change what appears in the title by default, some platforms make this a settings change and others make it a development task.
Upkeep. With an open platform, updates, security and hosting are yours. With a hosted one, most of that is not. The cost of upkeep is real, and it is a reason people choose hosted platforms. It is not an SEO ranking factor on its own, but a broken or hacked site hurts everything.
What no platform can fix for you
A platform cannot write a product description that answers a buyer's real question. It cannot tell you that your category pages are one line of text. It cannot earn mentions from other sites or make your brand known to the AI assistants that now recommend products.
It also cannot make a thin catalog deep. If your product pages are the manufacturer's copy, pasted, then you share your wording with every other seller of that item. A search engine has little reason to prefer yours. That is true on every platform.
The same applies to AI assistants. They draw on pages that explain things clearly and are backed up elsewhere. Our research page on how AI assistants pick businesses looks at what separates the businesses they name from the ones they skip, and platform is not the variable that stands out.
So the practical question is not "which platform ranks best?" It is "which platform will let me, or the person I hire, do the work comfortably for the next several years?"
Should you switch platforms for SEO?
Usually not, and almost never for SEO alone. Moving platforms is one of the riskier things you can do to a store that already has search traffic, because every URL that changes needs a permanent redirect to its new home.
If URLs change and the redirects are incomplete, pages that earned traffic and links turn into errors. A 301 redirect is what tells search engines the move is permanent. A migration plan should include a full list of old URLs, where each one goes, and a check after launch that nothing important is missing.
Reasons that justify a move: you have outgrown what the platform can do, the running costs no longer make sense, or you need integrations it cannot offer. Reasons that do not: a rumor that another platform ranks better, or a hope that a fresh start will fix thin content. Thin content moves with you.
If you do move, treat it as a project with its own owner, and do not publish new content on the same week if you can avoid it. Changing too many things at once makes it hard to tell what helped and what hurt.
How to choose without overthinking it
Work through four questions in order.
Who will run it day to day? If it is you, with no developer, a hosted platform with guided settings will save time. If you have a developer or an agency on call, an open platform becomes more attractive.
How big and how complicated is the catalog? A small catalog with a few dozen products rarely needs more than the built-in controls. A large catalog with many variants and filters needs more control over templates and crawling. See technical SEO for ecommerce for what that involves.
What else does the store need to do? Subscriptions, wholesale pricing, multiple currencies and special checkout steps often decide the platform before SEO enters the conversation.
Can you do the basics on it? Test it. Open the admin, find where you edit a page title, set a redirect and add a block of text to a category page. If those are easy, the platform will not stand in your way. The complete ecommerce SEO guide lists the basics worth checking.
Choose on fit. Then put your effort into the pages, because that is where search results are decided.
Custom builds and separate front ends
Some larger stores separate the shopping engine from the pages visitors see. The catalog and checkout run on one system, and a custom front end built by developers displays them. This is often called a headless setup, and some of the platforms above support it.
For SEO, this gives a team total control over how pages are built, and total responsibility for getting the basics right. A custom front end does not come with a sitemap, canonical tags or structured data unless someone builds them. It can also load content with scripts in a way that makes pages harder for crawlers to read. The glossary entry on JavaScript SEO explains the issue.
That does not make it a bad choice. Teams with strong developers often get excellent speed and flexibility. It simply moves the question from "which platform has the best defaults?" to "who will check that the defaults were rebuilt?" If you are not sure you have that person, a standard hosted setup is the safer route.
One practical test applies everywhere. View a product page the way a search engine first receives it, before scripts run. If the product name, description and price are in that first version, crawlers can read them. If the page is an empty shell until a script fills it in, ask your developer to fix that before anything else.
Apps, plugins and the hidden cost of add-ons
Every platform has a marketplace of add-ons, and many promise to handle SEO. Some are useful. Most are worth examining before you install them, because the cost of an add-on is paid on every page.
An add-on can change page titles, insert code, add scripts and create new URLs. A few quietly slow the store down. Some leave code behind after you remove them. It is worth asking what an add-on actually does that the platform's own settings cannot, and whether you will use it.
A sensible habit is to install one thing at a time and test speed before and after. Google's free PageSpeed Insights is enough for this. Then, once a year, go through the list and remove anything you no longer need. Stores that have run for several years often carry a dozen add-ons that nobody remembers choosing.
The platforms also differ in how many add-ons you need in the first place. A store whose built-in settings cover titles, redirects and sitemaps needs fewer of them. That can be a point in favor of one platform over another for an owner who wants to keep the setup simple.
How RunOctopus handles this
RunOctopus is a done-for-you service. Its AI, Ollie, researches your business, then writes and publishes pages directly on your own website. A team plans, writes, reviews and publishes alongside Ollie. It works with Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce and Wix, so the platform you already have is the platform it works on.
There is nothing to install, nothing to approve, nothing to upload and nothing to schedule. Pages go live on their own. In the first week you get 8 long-form articles, 6 pages and a custom interactive tool built for your niche. After that it is 175+ pieces of content a month, written, published and linked. You also get reports on where AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini name your business.
The promise: more visibility on Google and in AI answers within 90 days, measured against the 90 days before you joined, or every dollar back. You can see what Ollie would do for your store with a free site read. Paste your address and it reads your site and shows the plan. No account, no call.