Shopify is embracing AI on all fronts! The company announced new apps to connect to your favorite coding tool and quietly rolled out a native llms.txt file for merchants.
The new ChatGPT and Claude connector apps let merchants manage their entire store from within either AI assistant, including the ability to do things like look up orders, update product prices, and ask how new collections are selling. The launch follows last month's release of the Shopify AI Toolkit, which lets developers manage a store through agents like Claude Code and Cursor, while these new connectors are designed for merchants working in ChatGPT or Claude on their phones.
Through the connector apps, merchants can perform tasks like uploading a product photo and asking the AI assistants to add the product to their store, requesting custom reporting on demand, or quickly applying discounts across a particular collection.
Really cool stuff, but I'm personally hesitant to connect either AI assistant to my live Shopify store yet. I'll be testing the waters on a development store to begin with, which you should probably do too. Don't say I didn't warn you!
What about Sidekick? Is it getting kicked to the side?
Nah, it'll stick around. Shopify President Harley Finkelstein wrote on LinkedIn that Shopify Sidekick is continuing as the company's native AI agent, noting that “no agent out there understands commerce like Sidekick does.” At least for now, I guess.
In other Shopify AI news… the company has begun quietly rolling out native llms.txt files to stores without an official announcement yet, as spotted by Anton Ekström. The file, which is accessible at yourstore.com/llms.txt, includes store metadata like currency and contact details, direct links to product listings and search, agent instructions via dedicated endpoints, and UCP support and MCP endpoints for programmatic commerce. Funny enough, the file also contains a direct advertisement for Shopify and a call to action to create your own store! LOL, who are they advertising that to? The LLMs?
