Shopify Agentic Storefronts: what you control

Shopify Agentic Storefronts put your products inside AI conversations, where a shopper can ask, compare and buy without opening your website. If your store is eligible, agentic storefronts are probably already on. This guide covers what they do, which channels they reach, what they cost, how to switch them off, and the part they leave to you.

What are Shopify Agentic Storefronts?

Agentic Storefronts is the Shopify feature that lets shoppers discover and buy your products inside AI channels. Shopify’s help center names ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Meta. Your products reach them through Shopify Catalog, and the feature is active by default for eligible stores.

Shopify’s help center says Agentic Storefronts “lets customers discover and purchase your products in AI channels.” The word storefront is the point: the AI channel becomes one more place where your catalog is shown and sold, next to your online store and the Shop app.

The feature arrived in stages:

• December 10, 2025. Shopify introduced Agentic Storefronts in its Winter ‘26 Edition, naming ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, “with others coming soon.”
• March 24, 2026. Shopify said that “millions of merchants can sell to ChatGPT users via Agentic Storefronts,” and made the Agentic plan publicly available.
• May 11, 2026. Agentic Storefronts got its own page in the Shopify admin, with performance tracking across AI channels.

The channel list has moved over time. Perplexity was named at launch and still appears on Shopify’s Agentic plan page, but it is not on the help center’s current list. Treat your own admin as the record of where your products are live. For the wider picture of agents that shop and buy, read our guide to agentic commerce.

How do agentic storefronts work?

Shopify Catalog sends your product data to each AI channel and keeps it current. A shopper asks an assistant, the assistant finds your product in that data and answers follow-up questions, and checkout runs in the channel or on your checkout. Orders arrive in your admin with channel attribution.

Three mechanisms do the work.

Catalog syndication. The help center calls Shopify Catalog “the primary method for agentic storefronts to receive your product data.” By default it lists title, description, options, images, price, availability and other key attributes, and it continuously updates them so stock and pricing stay accurate.

Conversational discovery. Shopify’s launch post says Catalog “infers categories, extracts attributes, consolidates variants, and clusters identical items.” Shopify’s developer docs add a warning worth reading twice: some fields “might be inferred by Shopify’s AI” and can vary in accuracy depending on the product data you provide. What your product data does not say, the system may infer for you.

Attribution. “Orders from AI channels display in your Shopify admin with channel or referrer attribution,” the help center says. Under Sales channels, then Agentic, you can see sales, orders, online store sessions and online store conversion for each AI channel.

The same admin page gives each product a listing quality meter. Its insights score description completeness, image coverage, product reviews, variant and option completeness, and shop policy completeness. There is also a search preview that shows how a query might return your products. Shopify calls it a directional signal, not an exact prediction, because AI platforms re-rank results with their own logic.

That last detail matters. Being in Shopify Catalog makes your product eligible to appear. It does not decide whether an assistant recommends it. Eligible is not the same as recommended.

Which AI channels do agentic storefronts reach?

Shopify’s help center lists four: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta. ChatGPT sends shoppers to your own checkout in an in-app browser. The other three use Shopify-powered direct checkout, which is on by default for eligible stores. Each channel has its own country rules.

Here is what Shopify’s channel pages say, one row per channel.

Channel	Where the shopper pays	Who you must sell to	Fees Shopify lists
ChatGPT	Your online store checkout, in ChatGPT’s in-app browser, or a new tab on ChatGPT web	Customers in the US (your store can be based elsewhere)	None beyond standard payment processing
Google AI Mode and Gemini	Direct checkout, on by default, shown only to customers in the US	US-based store selling to US customers, with a Google Merchant Center account	None for direct checkout
Microsoft Copilot	Direct checkout, on by default	Customers in the US	None for direct checkout
Meta	Direct checkout, on by default	Customers in the US, Canada or Mexico	None for direct checkout

Sources: Shopify’s pages for ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Meta.

Every channel also asks for your Terms of service, Privacy policy and Return and refund policy to be completed in Settings, and for you to accept Shopify’s supplemental terms for Agentic Storefronts. ChatGPT is the odd one out on checkout: its page says there is no ChatGPT direct checkout setting “in your Shopify admin” to turn on or off.

How do you turn off agentic storefronts in Shopify?

Go to Sales channels, then Agentic, and switch off Allow Shopify to manage for me. Then turn off direct checkout for one channel, remove one channel’s Shopify Catalog access, or turn off Shopify Catalog access for all third-party channels. Data can take up to 7 days to stop flowing.

Allow Shopify to manage for me is the default. While it is on, every channel is active, direct checkout is on where a channel offers it, and new storefronts are added automatically. Step through your options below, from the lightest change to the heaviest.

Your opt-out options, from lightest to heaviest

1. 1 Keep the defaults

   Leave Allow Shopify to manage for me on. All channels stay active, direct checkout stays on where offered, and new AI storefronts are added automatically.

2. 2 Checkout on your site

   Switch off Allow Shopify to manage for me, open Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot or Meta, and turn off Direct checkout. Your products stay discoverable, and shoppers buy on your online store.

3. 3 Leave one channel

   Switch off Allow Shopify to manage for me, open the channel, and turn off its Shopify Catalog access. Product data can keep being shared for up to 7 days.

4. 4 Leave all third-party channels

   Switch off Allow Shopify to manage for me, then turn off Shopify Catalog access. This removes existing and future Catalog access for third-party channels. Your products stay on Shop.

5. 5 Hide single products

   Set a product to Unlisted, or use the seo.hidden metafield. The product leaves Shop and every agentic storefront, and also leaves search engines such as Google and your sitemap.

Two details catch merchants out. First, the Agentic page has no per-product switch: hiding one product means Unlisted or the seo.hidden metafield, and both also hide it from Google. Second, Shopify notes that opting out of Shopify Catalog alone does not hide products, because AI channels can also find them through web crawling and indexing.

That second point is about your robots.txt file, which tells each AI crawler whether it may read your pages. Check what yours allows:

AI crawler access checker

Check whether 15 AI crawlers, from GPTBot to PerplexityBot, may read your site's pages.

Your website's address

For example yoursite.com.

Check my site

A quick check confirms you are a person, not a bot.

Descriptions checked 2026-10-13. We do not save the address or the result.

Open the full tool

What is Shopify Catalog, and which products can it list?

Shopify Catalog is how Shopify sends your product data to AI channels. A product qualifies when your store is on the Starter plan or higher and not in private mode, and the product has a price above zero, a title, an image, a publishing channel and an allowed category.

Shopify’s requirements page sets the rules. Products must be published to your online store, Hydrogen or Headless channels. Free products are left out. Products with sensitive content, such as mature content, are left out. So are whole categories, including alcohol, tobacco and vaping products, prescription and medical products, sexual health and wellness products, event tickets and live animals.

One entry on that list is easy to miss: uncategorized products. Uncategorized products are not allowed in Shopify Catalog, so they cannot reach any of these channels. Shopify assigns the category from your product information, which can differ from the category set in your admin, so set a category and make sure the title and description make clear what the product is. For one of our users, the skincare brand Jericho, two products sat in the wrong category until we corrected them: a salt soap, now Bar Soap, and a hand cream, now Hand Creams.

Products sold only to business or wholesale customers are excluded automatically when Shopify can identify them, for example through B2B catalogs or password-protected storefronts. If your product data lives in metafields or metaobjects, Shopify Catalog Mapping lets you point Catalog at the right fields.

Shopify’s own advice is “complete and well-structured product information.” Two things that does not cover. Shopify’s Knowledge Base app lets you write FAQs that AI shopping agents use, but its help page says it “doesn’t affect how often your store appears in AI platform results,” and those FAQs are not shown on your storefront. And a complete field is not the same as a page that answers a shopper’s question.

That gap is what we built SourceVision for. We ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your shoppers ask, many times over, and report how often you appear, with the range across runs. Then we draft what each product page is missing, what it is, who it is for, what it is not and a short FAQ, from facts you confirm. Nothing is written without your approval, every write is read back, and every applied change is recorded with what it replaced, so support can revert it on request. See how it works.

SourceVision is in an invite-only beta.

Request an invite

What is the Shopify Agentic plan?

The Agentic plan is for brands that do not sell through a Shopify online store. It adds their products to Shopify Catalog so they can sell in the same AI channels. Shopify’s plan page says there is no monthly fee and you pay only when your products sell.

Shopify made the plan publicly available on March 24, 2026, and rolled it out globally. The plan page describes it as agentic commerce with “no Shopify online store required.”

Setup differs from a regular store, according to the setup guide:

• Each product needs an external product URL that links to its listing on your existing online store.
• You verify your existing domain with a TXT record.
• “Direct selling with agentic storefronts is deactivated by default.” You opt in to direct checkout channel by channel.
• ChatGPT sends customers to your existing online store checkout.

If you already run a Shopify store, you do not need this plan. The plan page puts it plainly: “Already on Shopify? AI selling is built in.”

What happens after an order from an agentic storefront?

The order is yours to run. Shopify says you keep the customer relationship and the post-purchase experience, and its Meta page says you remain the merchant of record. You handle fulfillment, returns and customer service as usual. For direct checkout orders, the channel sees that order’s customer details, not your customer database.

Shopify’s help center says “you retain full ownership of the customer relationship and post-purchase experience.” Its Meta page is the most explicit: “you continue to manage fulfillment, returns, and customer service for these orders.”

The data page sets the line on what a channel sees. AI channels get product data such as titles, descriptions, images, pricing and availability. For a direct checkout order, the channel has access to the customer’s name, email address, phone number and physical address. AI channels do not get your full order history, orders from other sales channels or your general customer database.

What Shopify does not document is the shopper’s side after checkout. We found no Shopify page that says how order tracking or a return request reaches a shopper who bought inside an AI channel. Until it does, test it yourself: place a small order through each channel you keep on, and follow the confirmation, the tracking email and a return, the way a shopper would.

Then come back to the page itself. The assistant answered the shopper’s questions before the sale, using what your product page and policies said. If a policy is missing or a page leaves a question open, the assistant fills the gap from somewhere else, and you never see the shopper you lost. Your policies are part of the listing quality score for a reason. Read how AI shopping agents choose what to recommend.