Shopify moved the facts AI agents read about your store into the admin. Spend twenty minutes reading them

Why this is worth twenty minutes

If an AI shopping agent is asked "can I return this after 30 days?" about your store, it needs somewhere to look. On Shopify, that somewhere just moved. According to Shopify's October 26 changelog, as reported by Search Engine Journal, the standalone Knowledge Base app has been replaced by a page in the admin under Sales channels > Agentic > Knowledge base. The old app can't be installed anymore and stops being available on January 15, 2027.

Here's the part that's easy to miss. Some of what's on that page was published without anyone in your business reading it. Your store policies and contact details publish by default, and SEJ quotes Shopify saying the published knowledge base is "publicly available through the Storefront MCP," which is how AI apps, including Shopify's own Shop app and third-party ones, can reach it.

So set a timer, open that page and go through it in this order. An agent can only be as right as the oldest sentence in your policies.

Minutes 1 to 5: read what's already published

Start with what's live, because that's what agents can see right now. Shopify sorts the page into ten categories, including returns and warranty, payment options, delivery and fulfillment, and second-hand purchases, plus an "Additional Facts" category for anything you write yourself.

Read your published policies as if you were a customer asking a question. Is the return window the one you actually honor? Does the shipping policy still mention a carrier you dropped? Is the contact email one somebody reads? Policies tend to get written once, at launch, and updated only when a lawyer or an angry customer forces it.

If something is wrong, fix it at the source, in your policy page or admin setting, so the storefront and the knowledge base say the same thing. Shopify lets you unpublish everything at once, a whole category or a single field, which is useful if you need a wrong answer offline today while you rewrite it.

Minutes 6 to 12: approve or reject what the scan found

Shopify regularly scans your storefront for facts and offers them back to you for approval. Those stay unpublished until you decide. The changelog, SEJ reports, says nothing Shopify writes reaches an agent before it's published, which is the right default.

Go through the pending suggestions one by one. Approve the ones that are true and phrased the way you'd say them. Reject the ones that came from an old banner or a blog post about last year's sale. If you've changed your site recently and the scan hasn't caught it, you can request a rescan, but Shopify says it can take up to 48 hours, so don't leave it until the morning of a promotion.

Two edge cases: if your store is password-protected, the scan can't see it, so the page shows only admin data. If you run a custom storefront or you're on the Agentic plan, you can only add additional facts.

Minutes 13 to 17: add what nobody wrote down

Now look for the questions customers actually ask that your policies don't answer. The most common gap is cancellations. In an SEJ article published October 14, Bill Hunt queried the policy tool of 88 Shopify stores, and only two returned a usable answer about canceling an order. There's no dedicated cancellation category, so write your terms as an additional fact: how long after ordering a customer can cancel, what happens if it's already shipped, and who to contact.

Then think about your support inbox. What do people ask every week? Whether gift wrap is available, whether you ship to PO boxes, how long a backorder takes. If you've written the answer in a macro or an email template, it probably belongs here too.

Write each fact the way you'd say it to a customer on the phone: one plain sentence, with the number in it. "Orders can be canceled within two hours of purchase" is useful to an agent. "We'll do our best to accommodate changes" isn't, because there's nothing in it the agent can repeat as an answer. If a rule has exceptions, such as final-sale items, custom orders or international shipping, give each exception its own fact rather than burying it in a long paragraph.

One thing you lose: SEJ notes that the old app had a query log showing what customers asked AI assistants about your store and whether they got an answer, and neither the new Knowledge base page nor Shopify's agentic storefront page lists one. Your own support inbox is now the best list of questions you have.

Minutes 18 to 20: check the migration

If you used the old app, check one more thing. Stores with 1,000 or fewer facts had their overrides and additional facts moved over automatically and published. Stores with more than 1,000 facts weren't migrated, and Shopify says those merchants have to re-add the facts they want to keep before January 15, 2027. Shopify says it emailed them.

Even if yours moved automatically, it's worth a skim. "Automatically transferred and published" means the answers you wrote a year ago are live again, whether or not they're still true.

If you never used the app, Shopify says no action is needed. That's true for the migration. It isn't true for the policies and contact details that already published on their own.

After the twenty minutes

Put a recurring reminder on the calendar, and tie it to the moments policies change: a new carrier, a new return rule, a holiday cutoff. Holiday shipping cutoffs are the obvious one for the next few weeks. If your last day for Christmas delivery is written on a banner but not in your shipping policy or an additional fact, an agent answering a customer in mid-December has nothing to go on.

It also helps to give the page an owner. In small stores the knowledge base tends to fall between whoever handles support and whoever handles the site. Pick one person, and make updating it part of the same task as changing the policy itself. If you haven't looked at the rest of the Agentic section, we wrote about what to check on Shopify's Agentic page when it first appeared.

If the facts on that page keep drifting from what your store actually does, because returns, shipping and support live in different systems, that's the work our ecommerce team does: one source for each promise, published everywhere from there. Talk to us.

Related work: Sutton Place.