AI search is sending more shoppers to Shopify stores, not fewer
While publishers watch AI summaries drain their traffic, Shopify says AI-driven visits and orders to its merchants tripled year-over-year in Q2 2025.
Key points
- AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores tripled year-over-year in Q2 2025, the company reported.
- Shopify posted Q2 revenue of $3.6 billion, up 36% from a year earlier, beating Wall Street's forecast of $3.4 billion.
- Traditional search sessions also grew, up 1.3 times over the past two years, holding roughly a third of all storefront visits.
- Half of all AI-referred sessions landed directly on a product page, 2.5 times the rate seen with traditional search.
- 75% of AI-attributed purchases in Q2 fell outside Shopify's top 100 product categories.
For publishers, AI has become a headache. AI-generated answer boxes, the short summaries that appear at the top of search results, mean fewer readers click through to actual articles, which cuts the ad revenue those sites depend on. But Shopify, the platform that powers millions of online shops, is telling a very different story.
On its second-quarter earnings call, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said AI has become a "complement to search, rather than a substitute for it." AI-driven visits and orders to Shopify stores tripled year-over-year in Q2 2025. At the same time, old-fashioned search kept growing too.
Why does AI search help shoppers find products?
AI agents, software tools that can carry out multi-step tasks on their own, do something traditional search engines cannot: they understand context.
Finkelstein put it plainly on the call. A normal search engine grabs a few keywords, say "car seat," and returns the most popular results. An AI assistant understands the whole question: you need a seat that fits three across the back of a sedan, so it factors in dimensions, car type, and quantity all at once. The result is a match built around what the buyer actually needs, not just what ranks highest.
That precision matters for sales. When a buyer already knows the product fits their need before they click, they are far more likely to buy. Half of all AI-referred sessions in Q2 landed directly on a product description page, 2.5 times the rate seen with conventional search traffic.
What does this mean for smaller shops?
Small merchants benefit the most. Shopify's sweet spot is exactly the kind of niche, lower-traffic seller that traditional search tends to bury under bigger brand names. Finkelstein described this as the "long tail" of e-commerce: smaller shops selling specialist products. In Q2, 75% of AI-attributed purchases fell outside Shopify's top 100 product categories, precisely where those smaller sellers live.
In practical terms, a small shop selling left-handed kitchen tools or adaptive clothing now gets surfaced by AI assistants that understand a buyer's specific need, even if that shop could never compete on generic search rankings.
Shopify reported Q2 revenue of $3.6 billion, up 36% year-over-year, ahead of the $3.4 billion analysts expected. Gross operating profit came in at $1.71 billion, also above the $1.63 billion forecast.
The company has built connections to several AI tools including Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity so that AI agents can query its product catalog directly.
First reported by TechCrunch AI, the earnings call comments point to a split forming across the internet: AI is painful for ad-supported media and potentially very good for product commerce. For anyone who shops online, the practical upside is simple. AI assistants are getting better at finding the right product for your actual situation, not just the best-marketed one.
