How to Ask Shopify Sidekick Whether You Show Up in AI Search

Shopify's Sidekick is good at answering questions about your Shopify data. What it can't tell you, on its own, is the question a lot of merchants now care about most: when a shopper asks ChatGPT or Shop for "a product like mine," do I show up?

With the AgentReady Sidekick extension installed, it can. The extension hands Sidekick five read-only tools, and once it's there you just ask in plain language. Here are the questions worth asking and what each one tells you.

"How AI-ready is my store?"

Start here. Ask Sidekick how AI-ready your store is and it returns your current readiness score out of 100, your letter grade, and the top fixes that would move it. It's the same headline number AgentReady tracks, surfaced the moment you ask rather than after you open the app.

This is the right first question because it frames everything else. A B-minus with three clear fixes is a different conversation than an A that just needs maintaining.

"Where do I rank in Shopify's Global Catalog?"

The Global Catalog is the cross-merchant index that AI shopping assistants search when a buyer asks them to find a product. Ask Sidekick where you rank and it returns, for each buyer-intent query you track, whether your store appears, at what position, and whether a competitor is undercutting you on price.

This is the closest thing to a search-results page for AI shopping. "Am I in the results at all, and if so, how far down" is exactly what you want to know, and now you can ask it without leaving the admin.

"Why am I not showing up in AI search for this product?"

This is the most useful one for day-to-day work. Name a product and ask why it isn't surfacing, and Sidekick returns the specific catalog data gaps holding it back: a missing product type, no taxonomy category, a thin or empty description, variants an agent can't resolve. Each gap comes with a plain reason for why it hurts discoverability.

It turns a vague worry ("I don't think my products show up in AI search") into a concrete checklist for one product at a time. And because it's scoped to a product you name, the answer is specific enough to act on.

"Did my recent fix work?"

After you've fixed a few products, ask Sidekick whether it worked. It returns how many of your changes Shopify's Global Catalog has absorbed, the before-and-after lift in how legible your catalog is, and which tracked queries newly started surfacing, improved, or slipped.

Closing that loop matters more than it sounds. Most readiness work is invisible: you make a change and have no idea whether it landed. This answers it directly, so you know whether to keep going or move on.

"What searches should I be tracking?"

If you're only watching a handful of queries, you're probably blind to demand you could be capturing. Ask Sidekick what you should track and it suggests buyer-intent queries derived from your own catalog (your product types and categories), excluding the ones you already watch.

It's a fast way to widen your coverage without guessing at what shoppers type into an assistant.

The one thing none of these do

Every tool above is read-only. Asking any of these questions returns information and changes nothing. When you're ready to actually fix a product's catalog data, that runs through a separate action: AgentReady opens its remediation flow, proposes each change, and writes only what you confirm. Sidekick answers and the merchant decides, which is exactly how Shopify designed the surface and a principle we cover in building for Shopify Sidekick.

If you don't have the app yet

The Sidekick tools need the AgentReady app installed, since that's where the readiness data lives. If you'd rather see where you stand first, our free AI-readiness checker runs the same analysis on any storefront in about a minute, no install required. Either way, the goal is the same: stop guessing whether you show up in AI search, and start asking.