Shopify Magic and Sidekick: what Shopify's AI tools do

What is Shopify Magic?

Shopify Magic is the name for the AI writing and editing features built into the Shopify admin. Shopify’s help center defines Shopify Magic as a suite of free AI-powered features, integrated across its products and workflows. Their job is to help you start, run and grow your business.

As of September 2026, that help page lists Magic in these places, among others:

• Product descriptions, blog posts and pages
• Email in Shopify Messaging
• Instant answers and suggested replies in Shopify Inbox, for customer support chats
• The media editor, to remove the background from a product image or generate a new logo
• The theme editor, including a personalized theme for your business and code for custom theme blocks
• App review summaries, the customer cohort analysis report and customer segments

Shopify says all generally available Magic features work on every plan and in every language, on desktop and mobile. It also says it does not use any merchant’s store-level data to power Magic for other merchants.

What is Shopify Sidekick?

Sidekick is Shopify’s AI assistant. Shopify’s help center describes Sidekick as an AI-enabled commerce assistant in your admin. It gives guidance, generates content, builds apps and completes tasks using everyday language.

You can chat with it by text, voice or screen sharing, from any page of the admin on desktop or in the Shopify app. It keeps working in the background if you close the chat. It also uses past conversations and recent activity to give more personalized responses.

Shopify’s setup guide adds one gap: Sidekick is not available when you use the admin in a mobile browser.

“a super-charged cofounder for every merchant”

Vanessa Lee, VP of Product, Shopify, Winter ’26 Edition, December 10, 2025

That is the ambition. The day-to-day reality is narrower and still useful. Shopify’s Sidekick page says it has direct access to your Shopify data and takes action in your admin, which a general chatbot cannot do.

What is the difference between Shopify Magic and Sidekick?

Magic is the set of AI buttons inside individual tools, such as the text generator in the description editor. Sidekick is the assistant you talk to, which can work across the whole admin and make changes after you approve them.

The names overlap in practice. As of September 2026, the address shopify.com/magic opens a page about Sidekick. That is a sign Shopify now puts Sidekick first in its own marketing.

What can Shopify Magic write for you?

First drafts. Each Magic feature takes a short prompt plus details you provide, and returns text you can edit before it goes live.

Product descriptions

Magic takes details such as a product title and keywords and suggests a product description. You can write the prompt in any language, and the result matches the language of your prompt.

Email subject lines and body text

In Shopify Messaging, Shopify’s email marketing tool, Magic suggests email subject lines and body text from details such as the campaign type and product keywords. To generate a subject line, you click the Generate text icon in the Subject field.

Judge those subject lines on clicks and orders, not opens. On one Shopify store’s email account, the screen showed a 92 percent open rate while the click rate was 5.31 percent. Apple Mail Privacy Protection records machine opens.

More in why a 92 percent open rate is not real, and on the tool itself in Shopify Email or Klaviyo.

Replies in Shopify Inbox

Magic suggests replies to customers in chat based on your store information. As of September 2026, it needs your online store and admin in English, Shopify Inbox installed with at least one conversation, and 200,000 products or fewer.

Every one of these pages carries the same warning. Shopify says you are responsible for the accuracy of what you publish, even when automatic text generation wrote it.

Can Shopify Magic write descriptions for your whole catalog?

Not in one click. The Magic button works one product at a time: Shopify’s steps start by opening a single product, then clicking the Generate text icon in its description box. It needs the admin on a desktop computer, because Shopify says text generation for descriptions is not supported on iPhone or Android (Shopify’s steps for generating descriptions).

Sidekick can create or edit products from your instructions, and it shows each change for your approval first. Either way, a person still has to read every draft.

That check is not optional. Shopify’s help center warns that generated text can include product benefits you never listed, and facts drawn from content about similar products. If a draft has ever invented a feature, you were not using it wrong: Shopify documents that behavior.

A catalog-sized job goes faster with a routine:

1. Start with your best sellers, where a better page matters most.
2. Give each prompt the facts. Shopify asks for at least a product title and two features or keywords. Sizes, materials and care details give the draft more to work with.
3. Write the prompt in the language you want. Shopify says the result matches the language of your prompt.
4. Save your house rules as a Sidekick skill. Sidekick can save a prompt for reuse, so words to avoid and length limits go with every request. Still check the result.
5. Check codes, numbers and claims before you click Save. Shopify says published products show the new description right away.

What can Sidekick do in your store?

More than write. As of September 2026, Shopify’s help pages describe Sidekick doing real admin work, always with a review step before changes apply.

• Reports and data. It writes custom ShopifyQL queries, builds visualizations and exports reports, according to Shopify’s guide to getting help from Sidekick. In January 2026, Shopify added the ability to query payments and web performance data.
• Orders. It can add products to an order, change quantities, and create or edit draft orders.
• Catalog and marketing. It can create or edit products, discounts and collections, and build customer segments from plain language. It can also draft email content in Shopify Messaging and create Shopify Flow workflows, per its content guide.
• Images. It can generate images from a text prompt, within monthly limits that depend on your plan.
• Custom apps. Shopify says generating apps with Sidekick is available only on the Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, from a desktop browser. Generated apps can change customer-facing data, so Shopify tells you to test them thoroughly.

Sidekick Pulse

Sidekick Pulse researches your store’s data and puts personalized recommendations on the admin Home page as cards. It needs recent sales activity, an owner or staff member with admin access, and Shopify Network Intelligence turned on.

Sidekick and your other apps

Shopify’s Spring ’26 Edition, published June 17, 2026, says Sidekick App Extensions connect third-party apps to Sidekick. Support is live for 15+ partners, including Klaviyo.

“Merchants can now ask Sidekick real questions about their Klaviyo campaigns, flows, and revenue performance”

Anne Prins, VP of Product Partnerships, Klaviyo, Shopify Spring ’26 Edition

Useful, with one caution. An email platform’s revenue figure is still that platform counting its own results, so check it against Shopify’s Total sales by referrer. See which Shopify analytics reports show where sales come from.

Is Shopify Magic free?

Yes. Shopify’s help center says Shopify Magic tools and experiences are available for free, regardless of your subscription plan. Sidekick is included too: Shopify’s Sidekick page says it comes with your plan, with features and usage limits that vary by plan.

As of September 2026, Shopify’s pricing page lists a built-in AI assistant with “Millions of tokens” on the Basic plan. Its plan comparison lists Sidekick under AI features.

The limits show up in specific places. Image generation has monthly and short-term limits. App generation has hourly and weekly limits and needs the Grow plan or higher.

The real cost is time: reviewing drafts, checking facts and fixing what the AI got wrong. Budget for that before you hand it your whole catalog.

Does Shopify AI help your products show up in AI search?

Partly, and mostly through features that are not Magic or Sidekick at all. Shopify’s agentic storefronts list your products in AI channels such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Meta. Shopify says they are active by default for eligible stores.

“We're making every Shopify store agent-ready by default”

Tobi Lütke, CEO, Shopify, Introducing Shopify Agentic Storefronts, December 10, 2025

Being listed is not the same as being chosen. The Spring ’26 Edition says a new search intelligence view shows the top AI queries in your category and where you are not showing up yet.

When products surface in AI conversations but do not sell, Sidekick suggests fixes such as adding specifications to product titles, improving descriptions and filling in missing product details. Notice what those fixes are: better product content. Magic can draft it, but the facts have to come from you.

Google points the same way. Its guide to optimizing for generative AI features says Merchant Center feeds can help products appear in AI responses. It also says you do not need special AI text files; see what llms.txt does and does not do.

Google’s Merchant Center rules also say descriptions created with generative AI must be sent in a separate structured description attribute.

For the full picture, see how Shopify products show up in ChatGPT, how to rank in AI Overviews and product description examples that answer buyers’ questions.

What should you check before you trust the output?

Check it the way you would check a new hire’s first week: facts first, then fit, then results. Shopify’s own pages give you the rules.

1. Check every fact. Sizes, materials, claims and prices. Shopify says you are responsible for accuracy even when AI wrote the text.
2. Read the approval screen. Shopify’s setup guide says Sidekick cannot change your store without your approval and only presents options for you to review. Read them before you accept.
3. Test generated apps before installing. They can change customer-facing data.
4. Rewrite generic copy. A draft built from a title and a few keywords only knows those facts. Add the details only your store knows.
5. Keep your feed honest. Know which descriptions an AI drafted, because Google’s Merchant Center treats them differently.
6. Measure in Shopify’s reports. Judge a change by sales, orders and sessions over the same dates, not by the assistant’s summary of its own work.

That last step matters because every tool grades its own homework. On one store, Klaviyo credited email with 23 orders for August 17 to September 15, 2026, while Shopify’s Total sales by referrer traced 10 to an email click. Both are defensible; they count differently.

Have I measured Shopify Magic on a client store?

No. I have not measured Shopify Magic or Sidekick output for a client, so I cannot tell you from my own numbers whether a Magic draft sells better or worse than a hand-written one. What I can show is the measuring habit, and how I write product copy instead of generating it.

The measuring habit is the one above. On one store’s email account, for the 30 days to August 20, 2026, the screen showed a 92 percent open rate while the click rate on the same account was 5.31 percent. Opens can be machines and clicks need a person, so whatever writes the subject line, clicks and orders are the numbers I judge it by.

The writing habit is slower than a Generate button. On a second store, one that sells at a counter and online, I gave all 124 products a product type, a search title, a meta description and image alt text by September 17, 2026, with the titles written from the terms buyers search. Six product titles were wrong, and I fixed them, along with a broken FAQ schema.

Every claim in that copy was checked against the store’s own data, not drawn from content about similar products, which is the behavior Shopify documents for a Magic draft. If Magic writes your first draft, keep that check. The tool is fast; the check is what protects the buyer, and you.

Which tasks are worth handing to Shopify's AI?

Hand it the drafting and the digging; keep the judgment. Shopify’s own list of popular Sidekick prompts includes product descriptions for SEO, a weekly performance summary and help to optimize ad spend by channel. This split works for most stores:

The pattern is simple: AI saves time on the first draft. The final pass, where the facts and the voice live, is the part that sells.

What does good use of Shopify Magic look like?

Good use of Shopify Magic is boring in the best way. Drafts appear quickly, you correct them in minutes, and every product page ends up specific, accurate and in your own voice. Sidekick answers the questions you used to dig for, and every change it makes passes your review first.

What Magic and Sidekick cannot do is decide what your store should say, or prove that it worked. Those stay with you: the facts buyers need, the searches worth winning, and the before and after in Shopify’s own reports, as in The Traffic to Sales Method.

If you would rather have the product content, AI search visibility and measurement handled for your business, that is what AI search for Shopify stores covers. The rest of the AI search guides start with what generative engine optimization means for stores.

Does this sound like your store?

If it does, the service that fixes it is AI search for Shopify stores. You can see the before and after on one store in the case study.