Shopify's president said AI has become "a complement to search, rather than a substitute," benefiting smaller merchants in the long tail of e-commerce. The company credited AI search for its earnings beat, with AI-driven traffic and orders tripling year-over-year in Q2, while traditional search sessions remain the largest traffic source, up 1.3x over two years and holding roughly a third of storefront sessions.
The e-commerce platform reported strong Q2 results, with revenue rising 36% to $3.6 billion (beating the $3.4 billion forecast) and gross operating profit up 31% to $1.71 billion. Finkelstein explained that unlike traditional search engines ranking by keyword popularity, AI agents work with richer structured data to match products with buyer intent across multiple dimensions simultaneously.
He cited an example: when a buyer asks for the best car seat fitting three across a sedan, AI understands actual needs, dimensions, and vehicle type rather than just keywords. Half of AI-referred sessions land directly on product pages, 2.5 times more than traditional search, and 75% of AI-attributed purchases occurred outside the top 100 categories, Shopify's "sweet spot."