Shopify AI search boosts traffic and sales, not Google

E-commerce platform Shopify is reaping clear rewards from the rise of AI-powered search, a trend that stands in stark contrast to the struggles facing traditional online publishers.

During the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein framed AI as a “complement to search, rather than a substitute for it,” noting that the technology has been especially valuable for the long tail of e-commerce. That includes the smaller merchants who form the bulk of Shopify’s customer base. The company partially credited its latest earnings beat and robust revenue growth to this shift in how shoppers discover products.

This dynamic differs sharply from what is happening in digital media, where AI-generated summaries have caused a measurable decline in click-through rates. Lower traffic there translates directly into reduced advertising revenue. For Shopify, however, the opposite is true. The company reported that AI-driven traffic and orders to merchant stores tripled year-over-year during the second quarter.

Crucially, this growth did not come at the expense of conventional search. “In fact, search remains one of our largest sources of buyer traffic to our merchants, and it’s still growing,” Finkelstein told analysts. “Traditional search sessions are up 1.3x over the past two years, holding roughly a third of all storefront sessions.”

The platform’s financial results reflect that momentum. Revenue climbed 36% to $3.6 billion from the prior-year period, beating Wall Street’s $3.4 billion estimate. Gross operating profit rose 31% to $1.71 billion, also ahead of the expected $1.63 billion.

Finkelstein went deeper on why AI search is proving so effective for merchants. “While search engines rank by popularity against a handful of keywords, 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,” he explained.

He illustrated the point with a practical example. “When a buyer asks an AI assistant for the best car seat that fits three across a sedan, traditional search focuses on the keyword ‘car seat.’ An agent, however, understands the actual need, the dimensions, the vehicle type, and the fact that they need three. It searches across all of those constraints at once to find the product that actually works, not just the one that ranks highest.”

That multidimensional search capability is translating into stronger conversion rates for sellers. “Buyers’ shopping journeys are being compressed as half of all AI-referred sessions are landing directly on a product description page. That is 2.5 times more than what we see with traditional search,” Finkelstein added.

Shopify also noted that 75% of AI-attributed purchases in Q2 came from outside its top 100 product categories, a segment the company refers to as its “sweet spot.” The firm further suggested it is well positioned to benefit as AI takes on a larger role in transactions, thanks to its widely trusted checkout experience.

To that end, Shopify is actively building for the AI era. The company has developed connectors to major AI tools and agents, including Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Manus, Replit and Vercel, as well as vibe-coding platforms like Lovable. This allows merchants to build on Shopify however they choose, ensuring the platform remains integrated with the evolving AI ecosystem.