More and more people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot what to buy. AI recommends products it understands well: with clear details, honest answers and mentions outside your own store. Shopify is building a dedicated channel for this, selling products directly in the chat. The foundation for both is the same: clean product data.
How AI assistants find products
AI search works differently from Google. Instead of ten links, it delivers one answer, often with two or three recommendations. To do that, it draws on three sources:
- Your pages. Product and collection pages, guides, FAQs. Whatever is stated clearly there, it can quote.
- What others write about you. Reviews, comparisons, forums, review platforms. A brand that only shows up on its own site looks unknown to AI.
- Product data from catalogs. Prices, availability, attributes, increasingly straight from Shopify.
The difference from classic SEO: there’s no position 7. Either you get mentioned, or you don’t.
The new channel: selling right in the chat
Shopify is rolling out a sales channel that brings products directly into AI assistants, including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. Customers can discover products there and pay in the chat, via Shopify Checkout. You switch the channel on in the Shopify admin and choose which platforms you want to appear on.
The channel is being rolled out step by step. Whether it’s already available for your store and for customers in Germany, you’ll see under sales channels in the admin.
What counts here is the same as with AI search: the AI works with your product data. If it’s patchy, it’ll recommend the competition instead.
5 things that make your store quotable
- Complete product data. Material, dimensions, weight, care, origin, who it’s for. Ideally in metafields, not just in the body text. What’s missing, AI can’t recommend.
- Answers to real questions. An FAQ block on product and collection pages with the questions your customer service actually hears. AI assistants look for exactly these question-and-answer pairs.
- Guides with a clear opinion. “Which running shoes for wide feet?” An article that answers that honestly is more likely to be quoted than a category full of products.
- Structured data. Price, availability, reviews and brand in machine-readable form in the code. More on that in our article on structured data.
- Mentions outside your store. Genuine reviews, press tests, mentions in forums and comparison articles. AI trusts what several independent sources say.
FAQ
Will AI search replace Google soon? Not entirely, but a growing share of purchase research happens in chat. The good news: what helps with AI also helps with Google.
Can I see whether ChatGPT recommends my store? Partly. Visits from AI assistants show up as a referral source in your Shopify reports. And you can ask your customers’ questions yourself and see who gets named.
Do I need a special tool for this? No. The foundation is good content and clean data in Shopify. Measurement tools are only just emerging.
Can you help with this? Yes. Our SEO package covers Google and AI search together, with a monthly report.