Exclude and include products
Not every product belongs in every feed. Máximo keeps products out in three ways: Shopify eligibility rules (including seo.hidden), Catalog Intelligence defaults by product class and destination, and exclusions you set yourself. All three show up on the product’s Feed tab, under Destinations.
Eligibility vs. exclusion
Section titled “Eligibility vs. exclusion”Before you exclude anything, a product has to be feed-eligible in the first place. Máximo only syncs products that are:
- Active in Shopify (not a draft or archived).
- Published to the Online Store sales channel.
- Not hidden from search engines via Shopify’s
seo.hiddenmetafield (see below).
A product that fails any of these never reaches your feeds. There’s nothing to exclude, because it was never eligible to begin with. If a product you expect to see is missing, check its Shopify status, Online Store visibility, and SEO hide setting before looking for an exclusion.
An exclusion, by contrast, is a choice you (or Máximo’s catalog AI) make on a product that’s otherwise eligible: it’s a perfectly good, active, published product that you don’t want a particular destination (or any destination) to receive.
Shopify seo.hidden
Section titled “Shopify seo.hidden”Shopify’s convention for hiding a product from search engines and sitemaps is the product metafield seo.hidden set to 1 (integer). In the Shopify admin this is the hide this product from search engines SEO setting. It adds noindex / nofollow on the storefront and drops the product from sitemaps and storefront search, without requiring the product to be a draft or unpublished from Online Store.
Máximo honors that signal as an eligibility rule: a product with seo.hidden set is kept out of every destination feed automatically. You don’t need a separate Máximo exclusion for it.
| When Máximo sees it | What happens |
|---|---|
Product is already seo.hidden when first seen | Never sent. No destination listing to remove, nothing to approve. |
Product was already live on a destination, then you set seo.hidden | Máximo proposes removing it from feeds in Pending approvals. Approve to remove, or keep publishing if you want it to stay. Auto-approval for removals (if you’ve turned that on) skips the wait. |
Clearing seo.hidden in Shopify makes the product eligible again; the next sync can pick it back up. See Shopify’s docs on hiding a page from search engines and the app-facing seo.hidden metafield.
Catalog Intelligence defaults
Section titled “Catalog Intelligence defaults”Catalog Intelligence classifies each product (gift card, digital, free gift, restricted, duplicate, non-product, and so on) and applies built-in exclude/include defaults for each destination. You don’t have to hand-tag those classes for Máximo to keep them out of the wrong channels.
Typical defaults:
- Free gifts and promo items: held out of every feed once confirmed (nothing to advertise).
- Restricted or age-gated goods: excluded from Google, Meta, and TikTok by default; not excluded from Klaviyo.
- Gift cards and digital products: excluded from TikTok and Pinterest by default (both are ad platforms, not fulfillment channels); treated specially on Google where needed.
- Duplicates and non-product items: kept out of feeds when Catalog Intelligence confirms them.
When a product is hidden this way, the Destinations section explains why (for example, “Excluded by catalog AI…”). Turning Hide from all off puts it back into your feeds on the next sync if you disagree. For the full class-by-destination grid and how to override it, see Segment policies.
Hiding a product from every destination
Section titled “Hiding a product from every destination”On the Destinations section, toggle Hide from all to pull a product out of every connected destination at once. Toggle it off to put the product back into your feeds on the next sync.
Excluding from one destination
Section titled “Excluding from one destination”Each connected destination card lists the markets it syncs to. Use the toggle next to a market to switch it between Include in catalog and Exclude from catalog: this keeps the product out of that market for that destination only, without affecting any other destination or market.
Excluding a whole destination via CSV
Section titled “Excluding a whole destination via CSV”To exclude a product from an entire destination across all of its markets in one step, use the CSV columns Exclude from Google, Exclude from Meta, and Exclude from TikTok (set the cell to yes to exclude, no to re-include). See CSV import and export for how to use these.