Compare the facts behind the match
Related products often share materials, care instructions or a use. A summary covering those facts can be useful for all of them. A copied summary needs attention when it carries a wrong capacity, omits a relevant model difference or describes the collection without helping someone understand the product.
Review the summary where your theme displays it and compare it with the title, options and full description. This check detects repeated wording; it does not determine whether shoppers have enough information to choose.
How to find weak short descriptions manually
The short description lives in post_excerpt on the
product post. With WP-CLI, one query lists every excerpt that appears
on more than one product, with how many share it:
wp db query "SELECT post_excerpt, COUNT(*) AS uses, GROUP_CONCAT(ID ORDER BY ID) AS product_ids FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'product' AND post_excerpt <> '' GROUP BY post_excerpt HAVING uses > 1 ORDER BY uses DESC;"
Adjust the table prefix if yours isn't wp_. Add
AND post_status = 'publish' to look at live products only.
This works — with the same gaps as any exact-match query. It only catches excerpts that agree character for character, so the same paragraph wrapped in a different tag, with a trailing space or a capital letter changed, lands in a separate group. It hands you a list of IDs but no verdict on which paragraphs are worth rewriting. And it answers once: the next import can paste the same boilerplate into a hundred more products without anyone running the query again.
How CatalogLift finds matches and helps
The scan compares short descriptions across current synced products. It removes markup, decodes entities, collapses whitespace and ignores case. Empty descriptions are excluded. A group of two or more matches produces findings with a preview, the number of matching products and sample peers.
This is an improvement opportunity, excluded from store health. Dismiss it if the shared wording works. Otherwise write a clearer summary or request a draft using the product's existing facts. The before/after diff is reviewed and approved through the panel or a connected agent. Read-back and a re-scan verify the applied change; leaving a duplicate group alone does not prove a better summary.