From API 2026-04, Shopify refuses writes to any metafield larger than 16 KB. The value stays readable and becomes permanently frozen — to your theme, to your apps, to your flows, and to you. The free scan measures every metafield in your store and names the ones affected.
Specification tables, compatibility matrices, bundle contents, size guides, imported ERP payloads — the JSON metafields that grew a field at a time until nobody was watching their size.
A frozen metafield does not announce itself. The symptom is a sync that stops updating a field, months later, on products nobody is looking at.
the write limit, measured in UTF-8 bytes on the stored value.
the API version that enforces it. Already released.
what an oversized field becomes. Permanently, for every app.
to find out. The scan writes nothing and runs on the free plan.
One oversized value becomes two or three fields under the limit. Your theme reads all of them; nothing is lost.
Structured data belongs in a metaobject, and each entry gets its own limit. The products end up referencing it.
Cut it to fit, with the preview showing exactly what would be dropped from each value before you agree to it.
Yes, on every plan including Free. It is read-only. Fixing what it finds needs the Growth plan.
The values stay on your storefront and stay readable. They simply cannot be updated again — not by BulkGauge, not by your PIM or ERP sync, not by a Shopify Flow, and not by you in the admin.
UTF-8 bytes on the stored value, which is what Shopify measures. That is not the same as character count — an accented character or an emoji costs more than one byte.
Yes. The scan covers product, variant, collection and shop metafields regardless of which app or definition owns them.