Shopify says AI search boosts sales, doesn't replace Google

Shopify said AI-powered search is boosting its business rather than cannibalizing traditional search traffic, crediting AI at least partly for a strong second-quarter earnings beat. On the company’s earnings call, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said AI has become a complement to search rather than a substitute for it, and that it has particularly benefited the long tail of e-commerce — the smaller merchants who make up most of Shopify’s customer base. AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores tripled year-over-year in the quarter, the company said.

That growth hasn’t come at search’s expense, according to Finkelstein, who told analysts that search remains one of Shopify’s largest sources of buyer traffic to merchants and is still growing — traditional search sessions are up 1.3x over the past two years and still account for roughly a third of all storefront sessions.

Shopify reported revenue rose 36% to $3.6 billion from a year earlier, ahead of Wall Street’s forecast of $3.4 billion, while gross operating profit rose 31% to $1.71 billion, also topping expectations of $1.63 billion. Finkelstein explained why AI search is converting well 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 said — for instance, an AI assistant asked for the best car seat that fits three across a sedan can search across dimensions, vehicle type, and quantity at once, rather than just matching the keyword “car seat.”

The company said buyers’ shopping journeys are being compressed as a result: about half of all AI-referred sessions land directly on a product page, 2.5 times the rate seen with traditional search. Shopify also said 75% of AI-attributed purchases in the quarter fell outside its top 100 product categories — its traditional “sweet spot” — and that its trusted checkout experience positions it to benefit as AI plays a larger role in transactions. The company has built connectors to AI tools including Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Manus, Replit, and Vercel, as well as vibe-coding platforms like Lovable that let merchants build on Shopify.

Why it matters

Shopify’s numbers suggest AI search is reshaping e-commerce discovery without necessarily shrinking the search-traffic pie — a more favorable dynamic than the traffic and ad-revenue declines AI summaries have caused for online publishers.