AI & SEO Webinar Q&A: How AI is shaping SEO

SEO
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Topic summary

Following a webinar with 600+ attendees on AI’s impact on SEO and product discovery, the team addresses unanswered questions from the session.

Product Content & Structure:

  • Use whatever format (paragraphs, bullets, tables) best conveys information to users for product descriptions
  • Blogs may see reduced traffic as AI summarizes informational content, but remain valuable for brand control

Technical Implementation:

  • robots.txt is built-in; llms.txt not yet widely adopted by search providers but being monitored
  • No plans to allow manual sitemap.xml editing or URL folder creation
  • Recommended tools for checking AI search rankings: Google AI Studio, Ahrefs Brand Rank, Perplexity, ChatGPT Search

Knowledge Base App:

  • Backend-only with no front-end load for users
  • Content not published publicly on storefronts
  • Accessible via Storefront MCP tool to strategic partners, app developers, and in-house teams
  • Should include FAQs covering brand, policies, and story to help AI agents represent brands accurately
  • No automated integration with CSR apps like Gorgias currently
  • Custom FAQs created in primary language only—no automatic multi-language translation

The team invites ongoing questions and discussion about AI search challenges.

Summarized with AI on October 30. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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Thanks to everyone who joined our webinar on how AI is reshaping SEO and product discovery—we had over 600 of you live, and the chat was incredible. Your questions showed just how much merchants are thinking about this shift.

We ran out of time to answer everything during the session, so we’re continuing the conversation here. Below, you’ll find answers to some of the most asked questions from the webinar. And we want to hear from you! Drop your questions in the comments, share what you’re testing, or tell us what’s keeping you up at night when it comes to AI search.

AI & SEO Webinar Q&A

  1. Is paragraph form a waste of time for product description? Should it just be bullet-pointed data?

    1. Use the information format that is most useful for conveying the information to the user: sentences, lists, tables, headings, etc.

  2. lms.txt files or robots.txt, are you building this in? or shall we do it? Best strategy for that?

    1. /robots.txt is built in. We are not observing significant crawling of /llms.txt from any search providers but we are monitoring adoption.

  3. How do blogs work with AI models? What are the roles of blogs in these changes?

    1. You will likely see less traffic from informational content because they are often adequately summarized by AI. But your blog is still a valuable source of information because you have total control over what is said about your brand and products.

  4. Is Shopify planning to let users manually edit the sitemap.xml and create folders in URLs?

    1. No, we are not.

  5. Is there a good tool out there to check AI search ranking for our products?

    1. Here are all the tools we discussed in the webinar:

      1. Google AI Studio

      2. Ahrefs Brand Radar

      3. Profound

  6. How should brands leverage the Knowledge Base app to give the LLM providers high quality query data?

    1. Brands should consider the Knowledge Base as a complement to the Shopify Catalog; together they provide the complete picture of your brand to AI agents.

      For all details related to your products, the source of truth for that info is the Catalog. For all the other types of questions buyers might have about your store, your policies, your shipping details, your backstory, anything else – that’s where the Knowledge Base comes in.

      With the KB app, you can enhance and optimize that content to help ensure that AI agents represent your brand accurately, answer a wider range of questions, and highlight what makes your business unique. We recommend including FAQs to cover all the common questions shoppers have about your brand, your policies, your story.

  7. Is the app purely backend with no front-end code/load for users?

    1. This is correct. The KB content is not published publicly on the storefront.

  8. Which AI agents will use this knowledge base data? Is it all of them or specific ones only?

    1. KB data is accessible via a Storefront MCP tool that is available to strategic partners, any app developer, or merchants’ own in-house developers. It is not limited to specific partners.

  9. Can the Knowledge Base app integrate with CSR apps like Gorgias?

    1. Currently, there is not an automated way to sync KB content with apps like Gorgias.

  10. What is there to say about populating your knowledge base in different languages?

    1. You can create custom FAQs in your storefront’s primary language, but a FAQ will not be automatically translated and stored in multiple languages.
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Very insightful session.