Shopify says AI search is driving more traffic and sales, not replacing Google

Shopify's latest earnings suggest AI search is becoming a growth engine for e-commerce rather than a gravedigger for traditional search. On the company's second-quarter earnings call, President Harley Finkelstein said AI has become a complement to search, rather than a substitute for it.

That framing stands in sharp contrast to online publishing, where AI summaries have produced a measurable drop in click-through rates, cutting traffic and advertising revenue. For Shopify, the company argues, AI is a clear boon.

AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores tripled year over year in the second quarter. And this was not a case of AI taking share from search: Finkelstein noted that search remains one of the largest sources of buyer traffic to merchants and is still growing, with traditional search sessions up 1.3x over the past two years and holding roughly a third of all storefront sessions.

Financially, the e-commerce platform reported revenue up 36% to $3.6 billion from a year earlier, outstripping Wall Street's $3.4 billion forecast, with gross operating profit up 31% to $1.71 billion, also ahead of the $1.63 billion analysts expected. The company credited the beat, at least in part, to AI search.

Finkelstein explained why AI search works so well in commerce: search engines rank by popularity against a handful of keywords, while AI agents make multiple calls into Shopify's catalog, working with richer structured data to match products to a buyer's specific intent rather than keywords.

He gave a concrete 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, while an agent understands the actual need, the dimensions, the vehicle type, and the requirement of three, searching across all of those constraints at once to find the product that actually works.

The conversion path shows the payoff: half of all AI-referred sessions land directly on a product description page, 2.5 times more than with traditional search, and 75% of AI-attributed purchases in Q2 happened outside the top 100 categories, what Shopify calls its sweet spot.

Looking ahead, Shopify has built connectors to Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Manus, Replit and Vercel, as well as vibe-coding platforms like Lovable, and it expects to benefit from AI playing a larger role in transactions thanks to its trusted checkout experience.