How Findig builds its SEO suggestions
An honest look at how the SEO score works, how the suggestions are made, and what stays private. No mystery, no overselling.
Johannes Tebbert, founder of Findig
·
4 minute read
Findig gives every listing an SEO score and can suggest a stronger title, tags, or description. I want to be straight with you about what that score means and how the suggestions are made — because a tool that touches your shop should be transparent, not a black box.
What the score actually measures
Your SEO score checks your listing against Etsy's own published best practices — the guidance in Etsy's Seller Handbook about titles, tags, photos, categories, and attributes. It tells you, plainly, how well your listing follows Etsy's checklist.
What it does not do is promise you'll rank #1. No honest tool can — Etsy doesn't publish search volumes or its ranking formula, and a big part of ranking (how often people click and buy your listing) can't be read from the listing text at all. So the score sticks to what can actually be measured, and flags the rest instead of inventing a number for it.
How the suggestions get written
When you ask Findig to optimize a field, an AI drafts a stronger version following that same Etsy guidance. But the AI doesn't get the final say — Findig re-scores its draft with the exact same checker your listing was measured against. If the rewrite doesn't measurably beat what you already have, it's dropped, and you get honest advice about the gap instead of a fake "improved!"
Nothing is ever sent to Etsy on its own. A suggestion sits and waits until you click Accept. And every change you accept is saved to a history you can undo with one click, so trying something is always reversible.
Your privacy — what leaves Findig, and what doesn't
I run Findig the way I'd want a tool handling my own shop to run — and I'll be straight about what happens to your data at each step, including the one part that involves an outside service. Here's where each piece happens.
The score stays here
Calculated entirely on our own servers from data you've already synced. Nothing about your listing is sent anywhere to score it.
AI rewrites private
Generated by a private AI model dedicated to Findig — never a big commercial, ad-funded AI. Your listing text isn't sold, and it's never used to train anyone's model.
Keyword ideas opt-in
Turned off by default. Only if you switch them on does Findig look up popular searches — and it uses DuckDuckGo, a privacy-first search engine, not Google.
Publishing to Etsy only on Accept
A suggestion reaches your shop only when you click Accept. Findig has no way to change your listings behind your back.
Why DuckDuckGo — and not Etsy or Google
To suggest tags people actually search for, we need a signal of real demand. Etsy's own search-suggestions would be ideal, but Etsy locks them behind bot protection, so no tool can legitimately read them. Google's suggestions work — but I'd rather not hand your product ideas to an advertising company. DuckDuckGo sits in the honest middle: it's a real, free demand signal from a search engine that doesn't profile you.
One caveat I'll always be upfront about: those are web-search hints, not Etsy's real per-keyword numbers (which no free source exposes). Treat them as "searches worth considering," never as a guarantee.
The short version
- The score = how well your listing follows Etsy's published best practices. Not a ranking promise.
- The AI proposes, our checker decides — weak rewrites are dropped, not shown.
- The score runs on our own servers; AI rewrites use a private model, never a commercial ad-funded AI, and your text is never sold or used for training.
- Keyword lookups are opt-in and use DuckDuckGo, not Google.
- Nothing publishes to Etsy until you click Accept — and every change is one click to undo.
Questions about any of this?
If anything here isn't clear, or you want to know exactly how your account is set up, just ask. I read every message and reply personally.
Send me a message →