Tran Ngoc Thuy By Tran Ngoc Thuy

Shopify’s second quarter results, reported on August 5, gave the clearest picture yet of how AI assistants are changing the way people shop online. The message from the company is not that AI is killing search. It is that AI has opened a second lane alongside search, and the traffic coming down that lane converts unusually well. For affiliate publishers who have spent the past year watching AI summaries absorb their click-through rates, the report is worth reading closely, because the good news in it belongs to merchants first.

What Shopify reported

Revenue for the quarter ended June 30 rose 34% to $3.58 billion, ahead of the $3.45 billion analysts expected. Gross merchandise volume grew 32% to $115.6 billion, gross profit rose 31% to $1.71 billion, and free cash flow reached $654 million, an 18% margin. Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s president, described it as “a monster quarter: more than 30% growth in GMV AND revenue AND gross profit AND free cash flow.”

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The AI figures sat inside that result. Traffic reaching Shopify stores through AI channels tripled year over year during the quarter, and orders attributed to those channels tripled as well. Traditional search did not shrink to make room. Search sessions are up 1.3x over the past two years and still account for roughly one third of all storefront sessions. “AI has become a complement to search, rather than a substitute for it,” Finkelstein said, adding that search “remains one of our largest sources of buyer traffic to our merchants, and it’s still growing.”

AI shoppers arrive further down the funnel

The more useful detail is behavioral. About half of AI referred sessions land directly on a product detail page, roughly 2.5 times the rate for traditional search. Shoppers arriving from an assistant have largely finished comparing before they reach the store, so they enter at the point of decision rather than the point of research. Shopify also said new buyer orders from AI channels arrive at nearly twice the rate of other channels.

Company analysis from the first quarter put numbers on that quality. AI referred sessions converted at nearly 50% higher rates than organic search and carried 14% higher average order values. Shopify counts referrals from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude and Grok, and the company has built connectors so those assistants can query merchant catalogs directly.

A small merchant preparing orders for shipping
Photo by Bench Accounting

The long tail gets a new route to buyers

The distribution is the part most relevant to niche publishers. Shopify said 75% of AI attributed purchases in the quarter happened outside the top 100 product categories. In the first quarter, AI referrals outperformed organic search in 23 of 25 merchant categories, with an average lift of 56% inside those categories.

Finkelstein explained the mechanism with an example: when a buyer asks an assistant for the best car seat that fits three across a sedan, traditional search keys on “car seat” and returns the pages that rank for it. An assistant can make multiple calls into structured catalog data and filter on the actual constraint. Specific, awkward, low volume queries are exactly the ones keyword search handles worst, and they are exactly where small merchants live.

Why this does not contradict the AI Overviews story

These findings sit oddly next to the evidence that AI summaries are cutting publisher traffic, so the difference is worth stating plainly. Shopify classifies traffic from Google’s AI Overviews as organic search in standard analytics, not as AI. The AI numbers above therefore describe assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, not the summaries sitting on top of Google’s results page.

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The two stories also measure different points in the chain. Our earlier report on AI Overviews eating search clicks measured clicks arriving at publisher sites. Shopify measures sessions arriving at merchant storefronts. Both can be true at once: a summary can absorb the informational click while an assistant hands a decided buyer straight to a store.

A shopper using an AI assistant on a phone
Photo by Jonas Leupe

What it means for affiliate publishers

Here is the uncomfortable reading. Every figure in the report describes traffic to a merchant, not to a publisher. When an assistant reads a catalog and sends a shopper directly to a product page, the review or comparison page that would normally sit in between is not in the path. No click through an affiliate link, no cookie, no commission, even though the purchase still happened.

That does not make the trend hopeless, but it moves the leverage. Assistants build recommendations from sources they can parse and trust, which raises the value of being one of those sources: clean structured data, claims specific enough to verify, and first hand testing that cannot be synthesized from a spec sheet. It also raises the value of relationships that do not depend on a referral click at all, which is worth weighing when choosing an affiliate network or comparing tools and the networks behind them.

Scale deserves a caveat too. Tripling year over year is a growth rate, not a share. AI channels are expanding from a small base, and Shopify’s own framing, that search still supplies about a third of storefront sessions and continues to grow, is the more important number for anyone planning the next twelve months.

The bottom line

Shopify’s data is the strongest evidence so far that AI shopping is producing real revenue rather than demos, and that it is reaching the long tail rather than concentrating further at the top. For merchants, that reads as straightforward good news. For affiliate publishers, it is a signal about position. Value is shifting toward whoever an assistant trusts as a source and away from whoever merely ranks, and the sites that adapt early will be the ones the assistants quote.

Sources: Shopify second quarter 2026 results, Shopify Enterprise, and reporting by TechCrunch.

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About the Author

Tran Ngoc Thuy
Tran Ngoc Thuy

Founder & Manager of AffiliateCMS.com. Learning and sharing insights on #SEO/#GEO, #Affiliate, #AI, #MMO, and #Crypto. Tech enthusiast, tester, and reviewer. Links earn affiliate $.

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