Will Shopify Analytics be a reliable as a source to KPI any work we do on our store results in increased presence appearing in various AEO engines? What analytics query will generate the results?
This is David from SearchPie here.
Shopify Analytics provides a useful starting point but is not a completely reliable standalone source due to an attribution gap often called shadow AI. Many platforms fail to pass referrer headers consistently, which causes AI-driven visits to be mislabeled as direct or organic social traffic.
To get a complete picture, you should supplement Shopify’s data with manual prompt testing and monitor your server logs for specific bot agents like OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot.
Hope this helps!