Shopify: AI Search Drives More Traffic and Sales, Not Replacing Google

On Shopify's second-quarter earnings call, President Harley Finkelstein said AI has become a complement to search rather than a substitute, particularly benefiting smaller merchants. The company credited its earnings beat and soaring revenue partly to AI search. AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores tripled year-over-year in Q2. Traditional search remains a large and growing source of buyer traffic, with sessions up 1.3x over two years and holding roughly a third of storefront sessions. Revenue rose 36% to $3.6 billion, beating Wall Street's forecast of $3.4 billion; gross operating profit rose 31% to $1.71 billion, also ahead of expectations. Finkelstein explained that AI agents make multiple calls into Shopify's catalog with richer structured data to match products with buyer intent, unlike search engines that rank by popularity against keywords. Half of AI-referred sessions land directly on a product description page, 2.5 times more than traditional search. 75% of AI-attributed purchases in Q2 happened outside the top 100 categories. Shopify also built connectors to Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Manus, Replit, Vercel, and vibe-coding platforms like Lovable.