Over the past couple of weeks there have been complaints from some Shopify site owners that Google was showing a (1) in the title name for their pages in the Google search results page. The issue turned out to be related to a chat feature activated on those Shopify sites, the chat feature fixed the issue and the Google search results should soon no longer show (1) in the title name.
What it looked like. I found a screenshot of this happening for a site in the Shopify forums dating back a couple of weeks ago, here is that screenshot showing the (1) at the beginning of the title name in Google Search.
What it looks like now. The issue was resolved and Google recrawled and processed this specific URL, so the (1) is no longer there:
It will take time. If you still see a (1) before your title name in the Google Search results, give it more time. Google has to recrawl and reprocess all of the URLs that were impacted and that can take time. If you want to expedite it, you can use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console and submit that URL to the index manually. But again, the issue will resolve itself over time.
Google’s statement. Google published a statement on this issue in the Google forums, basically saying it was an issue with the chat feature dynamically embedding (1) in the title attributes of these pages and thus Googlebot picked up on it and indexed it. Google’s Caio Barros wrote:
Why we care. If you see (1) in your titles in the Google or Bing search results, it was likely due to this chat feature in Shopify. Again, the chat feature fixed the issue and the search engines will eventually recrawl and reprocess those titles and show them correctly in the search results. It is a widespread issue, not a Google bug, but it was related to a feature in Shopify that had this unintended consequence in search.
