Shopper visits coming from AI tools on Shopify products have jumped 7x since January, while orders attributed to AI searches increased 11-fold, proving how quickly these conversational agents are becoming a bona fide commerce channel (not just a novelty). On its most recent earnings call, the company painted AI as a key growth engine and positioned this bump as early evidence that “agentic commerce” is evolving from experiment to everyday behavior.
Surging Referrals From AI Shopping Agents
What qualifies as “AI traffic” in this case? Shopify is monitoring chat-based systems and AI-powered search experiences that return products and deep-link into merchant stores. That encompasses integrations the company has been building with ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, for instance, so someone might ask for “best trail running shoes under $150” and get back shoppable results that route to Shopify storefronts.
The 11x improvement in AI-driven orders indicates that these sessions may not be drive-by clicks. Conversational prompts for closing, meanwhile, cut intent more quickly, and once the AI has visibility into inventory, pricing and shipping details, it can pre-qualify choices in a way that relatively insensitive traditional search systems do not. Shopify itself says its earlier survey data shows 64% of consumers say they are comfortable with the notion of AI being used at some point in their shopping journey—suggesting that this is part of a bigger move among chat-led discovery on the web.
Inside Shopify’s AI Playbook and Merchant Tools
Shopify’s pitch is that it has access to proprietary transaction and catalog data from millions of merchants and billions of checkouts, which it can use to power more intelligent ranking, product matching and merchandising inside AI surfaces. It has worked to build connective tissue so that product data, availability and policies are available in real time to agents.
Inside the company, it is also relying on AI to speed decisions. Its tools like Scout—to parse through giant volumes of merchant feedback, support tickets and usage patterns—are designed to shorten the loop between signal and product change. On the merchant front, tools like Sidekick are supposed to help shop owners make content faster, tune listings and answer customer questions more quickly.
Referred to by the company as agentic commerce, it is shopping that takes place inside of assistants which can search, compare and act on behalf of a buyer. The company is betting broadly on platforms, and it expects there to be many permutations of this behavior that coexist—from shopping embedded within general-purpose chatbots to retailer-owned agents living on brand sites.
What It Means for Merchants Today and Near Term
For Shopify brands, the pragmatic playbook in the near term remains similar: Get your product data AI-ready. That includes clean titles, attributes and structured metadata; up-to-date inventory and shipping windows; rich images and descriptions; as well as machine-readable fields that expose clear policies. They can’t recommend anything they can’t parse.
Businesses can expect the funnel to condense as well. When an assistant shows three vetted options and one-click buy it, discovery, comparison and purchase can happen all in the same session. That raises the importance of “trust signals” like reviews, guarantees and transparent delivery timelines because an agent will surface and summarize them next to price.
Finally, measurement will evolve. With legacy last-click attribution, you’re missing the assistive contribution AI provides in upper-funnel research. “AI-driven orders” from Shopify captures this by recognizing the interface with an agent upstream. This data should be combined with first-party analytics to determine how prompt-led discovery drives sales, returns and lifetime value.
Industry Context And Why The Spike Matters
Shopping powered by AI is expanding beyond a single business ecosystem. General-purpose assistants are being taught to transact, search engines are interspersing chat results with shoppable modules and retailers are rolling out their own branded agents. At Keen Ventures, we’ve singled out sales and marketing early on as value pools ripe for generative AI, and this 7x/11x detail from Shopify indicates that the value is coming not just via pilot metrics but into traffic and checkouts.
There are caveats. AI-based recommendations rely on timely, accurate feeds; latency or holes in catalog data can undermine conversion. Brand safety, bias and accuracy in pricing all require guardrails. And channel concentration is a danger—retailers need to diversify across assistants, and power strong owned channels in order not to become too reliant on any one AI gateway.
The Bottom Line on AI Shopping Growth at Shopify
Shopify’s first read is clear: Shoppers are leveraging AI to discover and purchase, and they’re leaning far more on it than at the beginning of the year. With revenue up 32% to $2.84 billion in the latest quarter, the company is banking that laying rails into major assistants—and empowering merchants with AI-native tools—will help that number multiply as agentic commerce continues to mature.
That said, if things continue as they are now, the next wave of e-commerce SEO will no longer be focused on ten blue links. It will be about being the correct answer within an AI conversation.
