Shopify Moves Its AI Agent Knowledge Base into the Store Admin
Shopify has moved its AI agent knowledge base into the store admin. Merchants with more than 1,000 facts in the old app must manually add the information they want to keep by January 15, 2027.
Shopify has moved its AI agent knowledge base from the standalone Knowledge Base app into the store admin. The company announced the change on October 26; according to Search Engine Journal, the old app will no longer be available after January 15, 2027. Merchants can now manage the information that helps agents answer questions about their stores under Sales channels > Agentic > Knowledge base.
How the Knowledge Base Works in the Store Admin
The knowledge base holds information that is not tied to individual products, such as return policies, shipping terms and contact details. Information is organized into ten categories, including returns and warranties, payment methods, shipping and secondhand purchases. Information that does not fit these categories goes in Additional Facts.
Information comes from admin settings, is entered by the merchant or is found when Shopify scans the storefront. Shopify checks the storefront regularly and submits any updates it finds for approval. If a change is missed, the merchant can request another scan, which may take up to 48 hours.
Different information follows different publication rules. Scan results remain unpublished until the merchant decides what to do with them. Information from the admin, including store policies and contact details, is published when it is created. Merchants can change the publication status of the entire knowledge base, a category or an individual field. That means checking not only what the team has added manually, but also information from settings that is already published.
The published knowledge base is available through Storefront MCP to apps such as the Shop app and to third-party AI platforms. Shopify cannot scan a password-protected storefront: its knowledge base will contain only information from the admin. Stores with a custom storefront or an Agentic plan can add only additional facts to the knowledge base.
Who Needs to Act by January 15
If the old app contained more than 1,000 facts, Shopify did not migrate them to the new knowledge base. Those merchants need to manually add the information they want to keep by January 15, 2027. The company says it notified affected merchants by email.
Where there were fewer facts, those added or edited by the merchant in the app were migrated and published automatically. Merchants who did not use the app do not need to do anything because it is closing. They should still check policies and contact details, however: these may be published from the admin without a separate migration.
The documentation describes the limit differently in different places. The Shopify Help Center specifies a maximum of 1,000 facts, including both system-generated and merchant-created facts. The changelog refers to 1,000 additional facts. For a store with a large knowledge base, that distinction matters when deciding what to add manually.
What Store Owners and Teams Should Check
Start with questions a customer would actually ask an agent: about returns, shipping or canceling an order. There is no separate category for cancellations. If the relevant terms are not in the store policies, they can be added to Additional Facts. The presence of an entry in the admin does not, by itself, show whether the agent can give a useful answer to a specific question.
Bill Hunt’s test, reported by the publication, covered 122 Shopify stores. He queried the policy tool at 88 of them, and only two gave a useful answer about canceling an order. That is the result of a specific test, not an assessment of all Shopify stores. It shows why answers need to be checked even when policies are published.
In the old app, a query log showed customers’ questions, which agent responded and whether it managed to answer the question. No equivalent log is listed in the descriptions of the new knowledge base or agentic storefront management. Metrics for sales, orders, sessions and conversions by AI channel are available, as is a preview of product search, but they cannot be used to check an answer to a question about store policies.
Developers should also account for a change in tools: Storefront MCP for policies and FAQs is marked as deprecated, although it still works. Shopify directs developers to Ask MCP. Its ask_business tool uses the knowledge base and store policies to answer customers, but the feature is described as draft and may not be available in every store.
My Take
I would see the move as a simpler way to manage information, not as a way to get a store shown more often on AI platforms. The documentation for the old app distinguished between the accuracy of answers about a store and how often it appeared in results. For purchase-intent traffic, it matters more to check that customers are not getting the wrong answer about order terms. AI is changing how clicks are distributed, but search remains a source of that demand.
Priorities here depend on how much information a store has and who maintains it. I would first compare published policies with the agent’s answers about returns, shipping and cancellations, then assign someone to keep the information up to date. Migrating entries does not replace that work: a scan may miss a change, and the metrics described do not provide a log of questions about the store.
Sources
Where the news comes from. The text is a retelling in the author’s own words; the facts come from the source, the opinion is the author’s.
- Shopify Moves AI Agent Knowledge Base Into Merchant Admin via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern www.searchenginejournal.com
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I work in search marketing for online stores, from catalog structure to assessing how changes affect revenue. In discussions, I try to distinguish data from a specific market from broad industry forecasts.
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Discussion 4
Piotr Zieliński
I’ve seen this kind of migration expose a gap between what a store team considers “documented” and what an AI agent can actually use: return exceptions and delivery cutoffs are often buried in internal notes, while the knowledge base needs a clear, customer-safe answer. For merchants with more than 1,000 facts, I’d review Additional Facts first and move the evergreen policies into the matching categories before the old app goes away.
Yael Vega
@piotr_ziel, buried in internal notes is great for archaeologists, less so for an AI agent—especially when the cutoff is hiding in Additional Facts.
Artūrs Rudzītis
I’d separate the joke from the diagnosis: a cutoff in Additional Facts is a content-structure problem, not proof that the information is unusable. The admin now has dedicated categories for shipping and returns, so the practical check is whether those policies are clear there—and whether the agent gives the right answer before and after the move.
Alex Uur
@arta_rudzite, in a small store content audit, I found a delivery cutoff stated clearly on the shipping page but buried in a catch-all FAQ answer—moving it into a dedicated shipping entry made it much easier to verify what the agent would tell shoppers. For this migration, I’d test a few real cutoff and return-exception questions before and after moving the facts 🚀