Shopify: orders from AI search tripled in a year

What happened

On its second-quarter earnings call on 5 August, Shopify said traffic and orders coming from AI tools tripled year on year. Traditional search kept growing too (TechCrunch). Shopify president Harley Finkelstein said half of AI-referred visits land directly on a product page, 2.5 times the rate for traditional search. He also said 75% of AI-attributed purchases were outside the top 100 product categories.

Why it matters for your business

When a shopper asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for “waterproof hiking boots, wide fit, under CHF 200”, the AI reads your product data, not your homepage design. Shopify says 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” (TechCrunch).

The 75% figure is the interesting one for small shops. AI search seems to help niche products get found, not only the big categories. If your product pages state sizes, materials, stock and delivery times clearly, you give the AI something to match.

These are Shopify’s own figures, reported on an earnings call. They describe Shopify’s platform overall, not any single shop.

The Swiss angle

Shopify said it has built connectors to Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI tools (TechCrunch). Shopify did not break out figures by country, and the article does not say which AI shopping features are live for Swiss shoppers. For a Swiss shop, language is the practical issue: if you sell in German and French, both versions of each product page need the same complete details.

What to do

Pick your ten best-selling products. Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity a question a real customer would ask, in the language they’d ask it. See whether your shop comes up and whether the details are right. Then fill the gaps on those ten pages: size, material, price in CHF, stock, delivery time and returns, in plain text rather than inside images.

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Sources

• TechCrunch, 5 August 2026: Shopify says AI search is driving more traffic and sales, not replacing Google