Why does Magento have an SEO problem?

Magento ships with the building blocks for great SEO, canonicals, sitemaps, meta-tag editing, URL rewrites, but those defaults are incomplete and aimed at developers, not search engines. Out of the box, Magento has no structured data on category or product pages, no hreflang for multi-store setups, no llms.txt, weak default meta-templates, layered-nav URLs that bloat the index, and a Luma frontend that drags Core Web Vitals. Most stores never go past the defaults, which is why “Magento SEO” is a paid specialism. The good news: every gap is a fixable engineering problem, not a platform limitation.