Can AI shopping agents find your products if you’re not on Shopify? Shopify’s catalog now includes outside brands
Yes, increasingly. On 27 October Shopify added a beta option to its Catalog API that lets AI agents and apps search products from brands that don’t sell on Shopify. Shopify takes the description, image and price from each brand’s own website, and the shopper buys on that brand’s site. So if you sell on WooCommerce, Webflow or your own platform, clear and readable product pages are now how you get into this catalog.
- Shopify’s Catalog API now has a
sourcesoption. Agents can search Shopify stores, outside brands, or both. Shopify stores only is still the default. - Data for outside brands comes from each brand’s own website. Shopify says it does not verify it.
- During the beta, outside brands only show up for shoppers in the US.
- Outside products have no Shopify checkout. Agents must link to the brand’s product page and show the seller’s name.
What happened
On 27 October Shopify announced in its developer changelog that the Catalog API can now return products from brands that don’t sell on Shopify. AI agents and shopping apps use this API to search products for shoppers. Until now it only covered Shopify stores. Each outside product comes with a description, an image, a price and a link to the brand’s own product page.
What this means for your site or store
If an agent uses this catalog, it now sees your products through your product pages, even if you don’t sell on Shopify. What it shows a shopper depends on what it can read there.
- Make sure every product page has a clear name, a plain-text description, a good main image and a visible price.
- Keep prices up to date on the page itself. Shopify only shows the price it saw at its last check.
- Add Product schema, so machines can read the price and product details without guessing.
- Don’t block AI crawlers from your product pages in robots.txt.
For the bigger picture, read how shoppers use ChatGPT to find products.
The technical details
According to Shopify’s catalog docs, developers set sources to ["shopify","external"] to get both kinds of results, or ["external"] for outside brands only. Outside products return native_checkout: false and earn no Promoted Placements commission. Prices are a guide and may be missing, and stock is not tracked. Shopify strips HTML from descriptions and caches copies of images. Brands can ask Shopify through its Help Center to remove products, images or whole domains.
Not sure what AI agents can read on your site? Run our free AI check, or get robots.txt, llms.txt and schema written for you with the AI-Ready Kit.
FAQ
Sources
- Search brands that don’t sell on Shopify in the Catalog API (beta), Shopify Developer Changelog
- Global catalog extension: catalog sources, Shopify Developer Docs
