The feature lets merchants publish their catalogs to artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot so that shoppers can ask questions, compare items and complete purchases in a single thread, per the company’s Wednesday (Dec. 10) announcement. Shopify said the update responds to a clear shift away from search pages and toward conversational interfaces where consumers describe intent directly to AI systems.
Agentic Storefronts uses Shopify Catalog, a structured data system that formats attributes, pricing, availability and store policies in ways AI models can interpret. When a shopper asks about fit, materials or compatibility, the agent retrieves that data and returns specific suggestions. After a shopper selects an item, the agent routes the order into Shopify’s checkout while preserving attribution. According to Shopify’s announcement, centralizing these inputs reduces the risk of losing visibility inside AI ecosystems it does not control, a concern merchants have raised as AI platforms become gatekeepers for product discovery.
AI Agents Move to the Center of Discovery
The shift toward AI-directed discovery aligns with patterns PYMNTS has been tracking. Shoppers increasingly begin their product searches with an AI prompt instead of a traditional query. AI tools now perform comparison work, generate shortlists and explain trade-offs, compressing steps that once required multiple searches and shifting early decision-making to conversational systems.
Holiday behavior demonstrated this shift at scale. PYMNTS data revealed that AI acted as a force multiplier for both traffic and conversion during Black Friday, with more than half of consumers using generative tools at least once for their purchases and Gen Z leading at 67%. These patterns indicate that conversational systems now influence discovery well before shoppers reach a merchant’s site.
In the company’s Q3 earnings call, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores has increased sevenfold since January, PYMNTS reported, and orders attributed to AI searches have risen elevenfold. “AI is not just a feature at Shopify. It is central to our engine that powers everything we build,” he said.
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The rise of agent-driven discovery raises visibility concerns for merchants that lack structured product data. If an AI system cannot retrieve or interpret a product’s information, the item may never appear in its shortlist even when it fits a shopper’s criteria. The visibility issue for merchants is among the concerns PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster addressed as part of a larger conversation about two agentic protocols now jockeying for the eCommerce ecosystem.
Smaller merchants face the greatest risk because they rely heavily on discovery channels to reach new customers. Shopify’s system responds by standardizing how product data enters AI environments that now guide early decision-making. “We’re making every Shopify store agent-ready by default,” CEO Tobi Lütke said in the announcement. “Shopify is the easiest solution for merchants who want AI agents to find their storefronts, understand their products, and complete transactions.”
Additional Updates
As part of its Winter ’26 Edition, Shopify introduced more than 150 updates, including a major upgrade to Sidekick. The tool has shifted from a reactive assistant to a proactive collaborator that anticipates merchant needs and suggests next steps. Sidekick can generate code, modify shop settings and build custom apps for the Shopify admin through natural-language prompts, reducing the time merchants spend on work that can be automated or accelerated.
Merchants using Sidekick report measurable gains. “Sidekick has been a massive game-changer when it comes to marketing, product demand, inventory planning and just maximizing my time,” Mordechai Hoffman, co-founder of Blurrd Golf, said in the announcement. “It used to take hours upon hours to do research, and now I put it into Sidekick and it spits out answers in a minute.” These accounts support Shopify’s view that AI can offset resource constraints for smaller sellers, though broader adoption metrics remain undisclosed.
