Shopify Homepage Title Reverted to Just Your Store Name in Google? How to Restore It
Your homepage is the page that ranks for your biggest keyword, and after a theme update its title in Google collapsed to nothing but your store name — the term you actually ranked for is gone. This happens because the homepage title lives in one single Preferences field that a theme change or an SEO/bulk-edit app can silently blank out, and when it's empty the theme just falls back to your store name. Shopify keeps no history of that field, so there is no "undo" once it's overwritten — you have to find the old value and re-enter it yourself.
Step by step
Confirm the real cause first. In Shopify admin go to Online Store -> Preferences and look at the 'Homepage title and meta description' fields. If the title box is empty or just shows your store name, that's it: when this one field is blank, the theme renders only your store name in the <title> tag. A theme update or an SEO app wiping this field is the usual culprit, not Google itself.
Recover the exact old title — don't rewrite it from memory. Open Google Search Console, go to the Performance report and filter to your homepage URL to see the title/query that was ranking. Or pull up your home page on the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org), use 'view source', and read the old <title> text word for word so you restore the version that was actually working.
Paste the recovered title back into Online Store -> Preferences. Keep it around 55-60 characters, lead with your main keyword and then your brand (e.g. 'Main Keyword - Brand Name'), do the same for the meta description, and save. If Google still shows just the store name after a few days, check that the theme update didn't change the <title> logic in theme.liquid — but in most cases refilling the Preferences field is the whole fix.
Force a recrawl so Google updates the snippet: in Search Console use URL Inspection on your homepage, then Request Indexing (the title in search can lag a few days). Then stop the repeat: SEO Vault keeps a daily snapshot of your homepage title and meta description — plus every product and collection SEO field — alerts you the moment one changes and flags the app that likely did it, and lets you restore the previous version in one click, since Shopify itself stores no history of these fields.
Source: Shopify Help Center: "Edit search engine listings" / homepage title and meta description in Online Store > Preferences; plus Google Search Central documentation on how Google generates title links in search results.
SEO Vault keeps a daily snapshot of every SEO field on your store — meta titles, descriptions, alt-text, tags, handles (products AND collections) — and emails you the moment something changes in bulk, with the likely app responsible. One click restores yesterday's state, just the SEO fields. Free to monitor and get alerted; $14/mo for 1-click restore.