# What Is Shopify Catalog and How It Feeds Your Products to AI > What Shopify Catalog is, what it asks of your store and each product, what is live and what is only announced, and how to check that your products get in. URL: https://clione.ai/glossary/shopify-catalog/ Lang: en Shopify Catalog is not your store's [product catalog](/glossary/product-catalog/), and it is not Shopify's B2B catalogs, which decide which products and prices each business customer sees.[^shopify-b2b-catalogs] It is **one catalog of many stores at once**, which Shopify builds from the products of the merchants that meet its requirements and hands out to AI channels. It matters to you because, if your store is on Shopify, your products may already be in it without you having done anything, and what assistants say about them depends on how good your data is. Shopify says it outright about ChatGPT: you do not have to do anything for ChatGPT to discover your products through Shopify Catalog.[^shopify-help-chatgpt] ## How it works **What it does with your data.** Shopify introduced it in December 2025: the catalog uses signals from millions of merchants and products to structure data in a way AI can understand. It **infers categories, extracts attributes, consolidates variants and groups identical items**, and keeps prices and inventory up to date across every agent.[^shopify-agentic-storefronts] **Where it takes them.** The AI channels Shopify's system works with are, according to its help center, ChatGPT, Google's [AI Mode](/glossary/google-ai-mode/) and [Gemini](/glossary/gemini/), Microsoft [Copilot](/glossary/copilot/) and Meta. Products reach those channels through Shopify Catalog or, for AI Mode and Gemini, through the Google & YouTube sales channel or [Google Merchant Center](/glossary/google-merchant-center/).[^shopify-help-agentic] In ChatGPT, shoppers pay at your store's checkout, which opens inside the app or in a new tab.[^shopify-help-chatgpt] **How agents read it.** For [agentic commerce](/glossary/agentic-commerce/), where an [AI agent](/glossary/ai-agent/) searches and buys on someone's behalf, Shopify offers two interfaces: the Global Catalog, which searches across all Shopify merchants, and the Storefront Catalog, limited to a single store. Both implement the catalog capability of the [UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol)](/glossary/ucp/) and expose three tools: search the catalog, look products up by identifier and get the detail of one product. A lookup resolves up to 50 identifiers in the Global Catalog and up to 10 in a store's own.[^shopify-dev-catalog] Agents connect through [MCP (Model Context Protocol)](/glossary/mcp/): the Global Catalog's [MCP server](/glossary/mcp-server/) lives on a Shopify domain, and each store's lives on the store's own domain.[^shopify-dev-catalog] **What it infers.** The developer documentation says it without detours: some fields are inferred by Shopify's AI, may be missing or vary in accuracy depending on the product data available, and are marked as inferred.[^shopify-dev-catalog] In other words, **what your catalog does not say, Shopify deduces**, and it does not always get it right. ## What is live and what is only announced Shopify has been opening the catalog in phases. This is what its own announcements say, by date: | Date | What Shopify said | Status according to Shopify's documentation, as of October 6, 2026 | | ----------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Summer 2025 | Shopify Catalog for selected partners | Superseded by later announcements[^shopify-winter26-dev] | | December 10, 2025 | Catalog open to all developers through MCP or REST API, and [agentic storefronts](/glossary/agentic-storefronts/) to sell in ChatGPT, [Perplexity](/glossary/perplexity/) and Copilot, "with more coming soon" | Live; today the help center names ChatGPT, AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot and Meta[^shopify-winter26-dev][^shopify-agentic-storefronts][^shopify-help-agentic] | | January 11, 2026 | The Agentic plan opens the catalog to brands without a Shopify store; direct selling in AI Mode and Gemini "soon" | The plan is live; AI Mode and Gemini are already among the help center's channels[^shopify-agentic-plan][^shopify-help-agentic] | | January 11, 2026 | Shopify merchants get access to Google's pilot of direct offers in AI Mode, for selected merchants | Announced as a pilot; no general opening date[^shopify-agentic-plan] | | June 17, 2026 | Shopify merchants with products that meet the requirements are in by default; per-channel control from the admin | Live[^shopify-spring26] | | June 17, 2026 | [Catalog API](/glossary/catalog-api/) access for any developer, with no prior approval, with image search | Live[^shopify-spring26-dev] | | June 17, 2026 | Developer revenue from sales that come out of their catalog experiences, with promoted placements | Announced as a "future path"; the documentation already describes it for approved developers[^shopify-spring26-dev][^shopify-dev-catalog] | One figure circulates a lot and should be read with its source: **Shopify says AI searches that use Shopify Catalog convert at twice the rate of those that use data scraped from pages**.[^shopify-spring26] It is Shopify's claim in its own announcement, and it does not publish the method behind the measurement. ## What it requires Shopify automatically includes the stores and products that meet these requirements:[^shopify-catalog-req] - The store complies with Shopify's terms of service and acceptable use policy, is on the Starter plan or higher and is not in private mode. With the Agentic plan, products can get in without a paid online store having been published. - **Every product has a title, at least one image and a price above zero**: free products do not get in. - Products are published to the Online Store or to the Hydrogen or Headless channels; on those two, with routes in the right format. With the Agentic plan and no Shopify store, each product carries the product's external URL. - Every product is published with an identifiable product URL, is not in "unlisted" status or hidden from search engines, and has no sensitive content. - The account has a good reputation, which Shopify reviews over time: verified email, two-step verification, a history of real sales, orders fulfilled on time, few chargebacks and paid invoices. A store can gain or lose eligibility depending on how it does. Each channel adds its own. For ChatGPT, for example, the store has to sell to customers in the United States, even if it is based in another country, and have its terms of service, privacy policy and [return policy](/glossary/return-policy/) complete; and if you turn off access to Shopify Catalog, **your product data can take up to 7 days to stop being shared**.[^shopify-help-chatgpt] A store that sells through its own frontend has a term of its own: [headless commerce](/glossary/headless-commerce/). ## In a store **Fictional example.** Five products from a mountain gear store on Shopify, checked against the product requirements: | Product | What fails | Does it get into the catalog? | | --------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------- | | Ruta 30 backpack | Nothing | Yes, if the account also qualifies | | Gift card | Zero price | No: free products do not get in | | Rain cover | No image | No: at least one is required | | Sample trekking poles | "Unlisted" status | No | | Cima jacket | Hidden from search engines on its [product page](/glossary/product-page/) | No | The backpack gets in, but it gets in with whatever it has. If its listing does not state the capacity, the material or the category, those are the fields Shopify can infer, with the variable accuracy its documentation admits.[^shopify-dev-catalog] Shopify also says you can define your schema and group products by standard attributes and [metafields](/glossary/shopify-metafields/) so agents present them well.[^shopify-agentic-storefronts] Thinking that because Shopify infers categories and attributes, you no longer need a complete catalog. Shopify says the opposite in its documentation: what is inferred may be missing or vary in accuracy depending on the product data available.[^shopify-dev-catalog] **Inference fills gaps; it does not replace data the store knows and has not written down.** ## How to check it 1. **Open the AI channels section in the Shopify admin** and see which channels are active and whether discovery through the catalog is on in each one.[^shopify-spring26] 2. **Check ten products against the requirements**: title, image, a price above zero, published to the right channel, neither "unlisted" nor hidden from search engines.[^shopify-catalog-req] 3. **Check the account**: verified email, two-step verification and no open policy issues.[^shopify-catalog-req] 4. **If you sell with Hydrogen or your own frontend**, confirm that products are published to that channel and that their routes follow the format Shopify asks for.[^shopify-catalog-req] 5. **Ask someone technical to query your store's Storefront Catalog** with the product detail tool and compare what it returns with your product page, paying attention to the fields marked as inferred.[^shopify-dev-catalog] ## Related concept: product feed You prepare a [product feed](/glossary/product-feed/) for each destination, in its format and on its schedule. Shopify Catalog works the other way around: Shopify reads your store's data, structures it and distributes it, and in June 2026 it presented it that way, **with no extra apps or manual feeds**.[^shopify-spring26] The two routes coexist: for AI Mode and Gemini, products can arrive through the Google & YouTube channel or through Merchant Center, which is a feed.[^shopify-help-agentic] And in both cases the source is the same, your store's catalog, and that is where you fix the data. To keep going, the [platform publishing reading path](/learn/publishing-by-platform/) orders the rest of the terms, and the one on [agentic commerce](/learn/agentic-commerce/) explains what agents do with these catalogs.