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Shopify's head of growth: AI traffic converts 2x, logged as direct
Archie Abrams, who runs growth at Shopify, says shoppers sent by AI agents convert at more than twice the rate of other referral traffic. Analytics files those visits as direct, so a store can have AI buyers and not know it.
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"It's more than 2x that conversion rate coming from another referral channel," Abrams said on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, in an episode posted August 25, 2026. He meant buyers that AI shopping agents send to Shopify stores.
The episode notes explain why the channel hides. An agent drops the shopper on a product page, not the homepage. Analytics then logs the visit as direct traffic, and the notes say most merchants have no idea it is happening. The show gives a full segment to why AI traffic looks direct.
Abrams is not a neutral voice. Per the notes, he has spent five and a half years building Shop identity, cart sync and the Shop Product Network for exactly this moment. So the 2x is a Shopify number about a channel his own work serves. It is still easy to hold up against a store's own reports.
One seller's unexplained spike traced back to Meta's Muse
On September 24, 2026, @KyryloBndr described a Shopify seller who found a spike in orders with no ad spend, new campaign or influencer post behind it. According to Kyrylo, the buyers came from Muse, which he calls Meta's new AI shopping agent. Muse found the product through Shopify's catalog. Customers paid with Shop Pay and never opened the homepage.
The case had three tells:
- No campaign matched the orders
- Visits started on a product page
- Checkout ran through Shop Pay
The seller built no funnel for it, Kyrylo writes. The catalog was structured well enough for the agent to read it, match it and finish the sale alone. He adds that Shopify's CFO said in September that shoppers who start a search inside an LLM are roughly 80% more likely to convert, because the agent lands them right on the product page.
Kyrylo Bondar | EU tax + capital@KyryloBndrA Shopify seller checked their analytics last week and found a spike in orders with no matching ad spend to explain it. No new campaign, no influencer post, nothing in the usual dashboards. The traffic wasn't coming from a channel he was tracking at all. It was coming from Muse, Meta's new AI shopping agent, finding his product directly through Shopify's catalog and checking out through Shop Pay without the customer…
Sep 24, 2026 · View on X
Shopify now lets AI agents see compare-at prices
That catalog just gained a field agents can read. On October 9, 2026, Shopify said in its changelog that it now shares compare-at prices with AI shopping agents through Shopify Catalog, so agents can tell when a product is marked down. Until now, agents reading Catalog saw only the current price. A markdown shown on the storefront never reached them.
Merchants control this with a toggle in the "Compare-at" section of admin settings. The Abrams episode spends a segment on why AI agents need structured product data, and Catalog is where agents read that data.
A run of direct visits that open on product pages and match no campaign may be buyers an AI agent sent. Before the next sale goes live, open admin, find the Compare-at section and check the toggle, so agents see the same markdown shoppers see on the storefront.