Shopify says AI-referred orders tripled

Shopify says AI-referred traffic and orders to its merchants tripled year over year in the second quarter, while traditional search still supplied roughly one-third of storefront sessions. TechCrunch’s account of the earnings call reports that half of AI-referred visits landed directly on product pages—2.5 times the share from traditional search—and 75% of AI-attributed purchases fell outside Shopify’s top 100 categories. For commerce operators watching AI referrals destabilize publisher economics, the counter-signal is actionable: structured catalog depth may let answer engines widen product discovery even as they compress journeys elsewhere.