Instead of browsing a store, typing a search query, or scrolling a feed, a growing number of consumers are turning to AI agents to help them find and compare products.
This is agentic commerce: AI agents help shoppers discover, compare, and purchase products—all within a conversation.
Since January 2025, AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores has grown 8 times year over year, while orders from AI-powered searches have increased 15 times. Shopify merchants are now discoverable across ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, AI Mode in Google Search, and the Gemini app—reaching shoppers inside the conversations where they’re already asking for recommendations.
Discovery is only one piece of the equation. When an AI agent finds the right product, someone still has to verify product information—inventory, options, and pricing—calculate tax, process payment, prevent fraud, and fulfill the order. That’s the hard part of commerce, and it’s what Shopify has spent 20 years building across millions of merchants and billions of transactions.
Shopify is building commerce infrastructure for wherever AI conversations happen: from Shopify Catalog that feeds AI recommendations, to the Shopify Checkout that completes the transaction, to Agentic Storefronts that help merchants manage and grow their presence across every AI surface.
This guide breaks down how it all works.
In traditional ecommerce, once a shopper identifies a need, they search for a product, browse options, and check out. In agentic commerce, an AI agent helps handle some or all of those steps—surfacing relevant products, answering questions, and guiding the shopper through to purchase.
For example, a shopper might ask an AI chat, “Find me a birthday gift for a 10-year-old who likes art.” The AI agent searches across connected product catalogs, considers what it already knows about the shopper’s preferences and budget, and presents a curated set of recommendations. The shopper can ask follow-up questions—”What about something under $30?”—and the agent refines its suggestions. When the shopper is ready, they complete the purchase either directly in the chat or through an in-app browser, without needing to navigate to the merchant’s storefront.
Behind that experience, a series of systems are working together:
Each AI platform has a different interface, a different approach to product discovery, and a different buying experience. Without a shared foundation, every new platform would require its own custom commerce integration—and require the merchant to build and maintain it—with separate cart logic, checkout flows, and payment handling.
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) solves this. Co-developed by Shopify and Google, UCP is an open standard that defines how AI agents transact with merchants—covering cart creation, checkout, payment, and post-purchase—across any platform and any payment processor. UCP is backed by Amazon, American Express, Etsy, Mastercard, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, Stripe, Target, Walmart, and Visa.
UCP allows a merchant’s checkout rules, discounts, and terms to work consistently regardless of which AI agent initiates the interaction. When a new AI platform adopts UCP, Shopify merchants are automatically ready to sell there—no additional integration required.
AI agents don’t browse a store the way a human does. They read structured data—product titles, descriptions, images, pricing, inventory, shipping speeds—and use it to decide what to recommend. The quality and completeness of that data determines whether a product surfaces in a conversation or gets passed over.
Shopify Catalog is the structured data layer that makes products readable to AI agents. It contains billions of products across millions of merchants, standardizes them into a universal taxonomy, verifies pricing and inventory in real time, and syndicates that data to every connected AI platform automatically.
For merchants, there’s nothing to configure. Eligible products are listed in Shopify Catalog by default. Any updates made in admin—new pricing, inventory changes, updated descriptions—are reflected automatically across all AI channels.
Shopify Catalog builds on the product information a merchant submits. Using machine learning and billions of transaction signals, Catalog infers additional product attributes that make products more discoverable. A candle listed under “home decor” might be identified as a popular Mother’s Day gift based on purchase patterns—making it more likely to surface when an AI agent is asked for gift recommendations.
This is the core of what’s becoming known as generative engine optimization (GEO): optimizing product data not for traditional search engine crawlers, but for AI agents that retrieve, rank, and recommend products in response to natural language queries. Just as early investment in SEO created lasting advantages in search rankings, merchants with rich, structured product data will have a compounding edge as AI shopping scales.
Key components of GEO include data completeness (rich metadata and attributes), structured formatting (proper taxonomy and categorization), trust signals (real-time pricing and inventory), and engagement signals (click-through rates and conversions). Shopify Catalog handles most of this automatically—effectively providing GEO as a service.
AI platforms that don’t have access to structured data through a source like Shopify Catalog rely on web scraping—which often surfaces outdated pricing, incorrect inventory, and missing product context. That erodes buyer trust and costs merchants sales.
Merchants could submit product feeds directly to each AI platform individually, but that means learning each platform’s taxonomy, maintaining separate feeds, and repeating the work every time a new channel launches. With Catalog, a merchant lists once and is automatically syndicated to every current and future AI partner—including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and the Shop App.
Agentic Storefronts is a sales channel in the Shopify admin that connects a merchant’s products to AI shopping platforms. Products are syndicated across every major AI channel automatically—with no apps to install, no custom integrations, and no transaction fees beyond standard processing rates.
Supported AI channels include:
Across all channels, the merchant remains the merchant of record. Customer relationships stay with the merchant, and every order flows into admin with attribution showing which AI channel drove the sale.
Agentic Storefronts is available to all Shopify merchants with products eligible for Shopify Catalog. Channel-specific requirements vary:
For Microsoft Copilot and AI Mode in Google Search, merchants can turn direct checkout on or off in Settings > Sales Channels > Agentic Storefronts in the admin. This determines whether buyers complete purchases inside the AI interface.
For ChatGPT, any merchant in Shopify Catalog who sells to US buyers is discoverable by default. Because checkout happens on the merchant’s own online store via an in-app browser, there’s no separate direct checkout to manage.
AI agents can scrape a store’s About page or FAQ section, but they can’t always interpret that information accurately. Shopify’s Knowledge Base app gives merchants control over what AI agents say about their brand by providing structured, verified answers.
Upload return policies, shipping information, brand voice guidelines, and FAQs to Knowledge Base. When an AI agent answers a question about a store (such as “Does this brand offer free returns?”), it references verified information instead of generating a guess.
This matters because AI conversations are replacing the browsing behavior that used to lead a shopper to a store’s policy pages. If a buyer asks an AI agent about return policies and gets an inaccurate or vague answer, that’s a lost sale the merchant never sees. Knowledge Base ensures the agent has the right answer before the shopper has to go looking for it.
The products above—Shopify Catalog, Agentic Storefronts, Knowledge Base—are built into the Shopify platform. But the demand for AI-powered product discovery extends beyond Shopify’s existing merchant base.
Shopify’s Agentic Plan is designed for businesses that run their ecommerce on other platforms—SAP, custom ERP systems, or other commerce solutions—and want to sell through AI channels without needing to replatform. Brands add their products to Shopify Catalog, get syndicated across AI channels, and can offer buyers direct checkout inside AI conversations—all powered by Shopify’s infrastructure.
There’s no monthly subscription cost. Businesses pay standard payment rates when products sell through channels powered by Shopify Checkout. For ChatGPT, where checkout happens on the brand’s own website via an in-app browser, transactions run through the brand’s existing payment processor.
Setup is flexible to meet merchant needs. A brand can start with a subset of its catalog, use only its most popular discount codes, and layer in complexity over time—or go all in from day one. The plan integrates directly with existing product information management (PIM) systems, tax configurations, and order management systems. It’s designed as a sidecar to an existing commerce stack, not a replacement for it.
