On Shopify’s Q2 earnings call with analysts, president Harley Finkelstein said the ecommerce platform and its ecosystem are “well-suited to this agentic era” of artificial intelligence (AI).
Finkelstein said Shopify has been investing in the search index for about two years. It has been going through 20 years of commerce data from more than 1 billion products, distilling it all for agents, he said. He called Shopify’s catalog “the authoritative source of truth for AI product discovery.”
The feature enables Shopify merchants to tie their product catalogs to large language models (LLMs) for agentic discovery. That has made Shopify brands shoppable within platforms including ChatGPT.
“It structures merchants’ product data so every and any AI partner can access it directly, giving agents the ability to discover, understand and recommend our merchants’ products,” Finkelstein said. He said Shopify has found that “AI searches powered by Catalog converted twice the rate of those using scraped data. That is because with Catalog, merchants’ products show up complete, accurate, and with the right context when someone is ready to buy.”
In 2025, more than 115 of the Top 2000 online retailers in North America use Shopify as their ecommerce platform, according to Digital Commerce 360 data. The combined web sales of all Top 2000 retailers that used Shopify’s ecommerce platform in 2025 reached $10.458 billion. The Top 2000 Database ranks North America’s largest online retailers based on their annual ecommerce sales and more.
How Shopify is using integrations to guide agentic AI growth
Finkelstein specified that Shopify is working with technology companies including OpenAI, Google, Meta and Microsoft on ecommerce.
Shopify also has created connectors to agents including Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Manus, Replit and Vercel in its AI toolkit, he said.
“We build the primitives, we open them up, and we let the best developers and the best companies in the world build on top of us,” Finkelstein said. He went on to add that “whether commerce is handled by humans or agents, whether stores are built by people or AI, Shopify runs underneath it all.”
He also noted that because of Shopify’s infrastructure, each of its merchants is “UCP-ready.” That refers to the Universal Commerce Protocol, which Shopify co-developed with Google. The UCP is an open standard to allow AI systems to connect to merchants’ checkout flows and complete transactions within conversational interface.
During the quarter, he said, Shopify rolled out an agentic section for its administrative users.
“Merchants can manage AI channels, they can track performance, and they can get specific recommendations on what to improve, all from a single interface,” Finkelstein said. “Now, while the volume from agentic commerce is still small relative to our massive GMV, the growth trends are impressive.”
Impact of AI search on Shopify merchants
He noted that AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores have tripled year over year in Q2.
“New buyer orders are coming in at nearly twice the rate of other channels,” Finkelstein said. “And this is not just AI taking share of search. In fact, search remains one of our largest sources of buyer traffic to our merchants, and it’s still growing. Traditional search sessions are up 1.3x over the past 2 years, holding roughly one-third of all storefront sessions. That is AI as a complement to search rather than a substitute for it.”
Finkelstein said early data indicates AI search “has been particularly helpful to some of the smaller brands that form the long tail of commerce.” He said such brands also make up the majority of Shopify’s merchant base. They’re smaller businesses with niche products and customer bases, he explained.
Shopify has found that AI search began to “disproportionately benefit the long tail” in 2025, he said. That trend has continued, he added. 75% of AI-attributable orders in Q2 came from outside Shopify’s largest 100 categories, Finkelstein noted.
Differences in traditional and agentic search results
“While search engines rank by popularity against a handful of keywords, AI agents make multiple calls into Shopify’s Catalog, working with richer structured data to match products with the buyer’s specific intent rather than just keywords,” Finkelstein said.
He gave an example that a consumer looking for a car seat that fits in a sedan would receive different types of answers from traditional search and an AI assistant. Traditional search might focus on the keywords “car seat.” However, an AI assistant can factor in dimensions, vehicle type and other constraints “at once to find the product that actually works, not just the one that ranks highest.”
He said shopping journeys are being compressed, saying half of all AI-referred sessions land directly on a product detail page (PDP). That’s 2.5x more than what Shopify sees from traditional search, he said.
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