Written by Jeremy Souffir Founder, JTS Tech Services
The direct answer first. Since 26 October every Shopify store has a page in its admin, under Sales channels, then Agentic, then Knowledge base, that holds the facts AI agents are given about the business: contact details, policies, gift services, shipping, payment, warranty and anything else that is not a product. Shopify drafts those facts from your own published storefront pages, links each one back to the page it came from, and leaves the drafts unpublished until you approve them. Facts that come from your admin settings, such as your store policies and contact details, are published as soon as Shopify creates them. The standalone Knowledge Base app this replaces stops working after 15 January 2027, and the new page holds 1,000 facts in total. If you have ever wondered what ChatGPT, the Shop app or Google's AI Mode would say when a shopper asks about your returns, the answer now has an address, and it is in your admin.
What did Shopify actually change?
The changelog entry is short, so here is what it says and what the Help Center adds:
- The knowledge base is now built into the Shopify admin at Sales channels > Agentic > Knowledge base. It replaces the standalone Knowledge Base app, which will no longer be available after 15 January 2027 and can no longer be installed from the App Store.
- Shopify describes it as a single page where you review, edit and publish the facts AI agents get about your store. The Help Center calls it the source of truth for AI agents for all non-product information about your store.
- The facts are drafted automatically from information that is publicly available on your storefront and from applicable admin data. Each generated fact links back to the page it came from.
- Facts drafted from a scan of your storefront are unpublished until you publish them. Facts linked to your admin, such as store policies and contact details, are published when Shopify creates them.
- Shopify says it never changes knowledge base content on your behalf. Every drafted change goes through approve-and-publish or rejection, and you can unpublish any fact at any time.
- You can add your own facts in three shapes: a paragraph, a yes-or-no answer, or a set of tags. The whole knowledge base holds 1,000 facts in total, counting both the generated ones and the ones you add.
- Agents read the published set through the Storefront MCP, which is how the Shop app and third-party AI platforms query a store. You can request a rescan of your storefront, which can take up to 48 hours.
Who this applies to, and the one wording to watch
If you used the old Knowledge Base app and had fewer than 1,000 facts, Shopify says the facts you wrote or edited moved over and were published, and no action is needed. If you had more than 1,000, your facts did not move, Shopify has emailed you, and you must add the ones you want to keep before 15 January 2027. If you never used the app, the page is still there, with drafts from your storefront waiting unpublished. One ambiguity: the changelog says the knowledge base holds up to 1,000 additional facts, while the Help Center says 1,000 in total including generated facts. We are going with the Help Center, and planning for the tighter number is the safe reading either way.
Why does a settings page deserve a post?
Because of what happened the same week. Shopify's Fall '26 Edition, published on 28 October, describes the knowledge base in one line: your business details in AI channels, where you review and approve the facts that get shared with agents, including policies and FAQs. The same Edition lists where those agents now are: Shop Pay checkout inside Meta's Muse, Claude Duet, Grok Bot and Instinct; selling in Google Search, AI Mode and the Gemini app with checkout powered by Shopify; and a shop.md skill that lets ChatGPT, Claude and other agents discover products and check out. We covered in September how the Storefront MCP already made your store an agent API, and in October how Shopify opened its catalogue to independent agents. That was the product side. This is the other half.
Think about what a shopper actually asks an assistant before buying. Does this ship to Canada? Can I return it if it does not fit? Is there gift wrapping? Do you price match? How long is the warranty? Not one of those is a product attribute. Until now, an agent answering them either read your pages on the fly and guessed, or did not answer at all. Now there is a published list, approved by you, that the agent is told to treat as the truth. The upside is obvious: the answer is yours. The catch is the drafting. Shopify wrote the first version from your storefront pages, which means the quality of the draft is exactly the quality of the FAQ, shipping and policy pages you last touched, whenever that was.
Which facts are already live without you?
This is the part to read twice. The Help Center is explicit that facts linked to your Shopify admin, such as your store policies and your contact details, are published when Shopify creates them. Those are the refund policy, privacy policy, terms of service, shipping policy and contact page text you set up under Settings, in many stores years ago, often from a template, and sometimes never finished. If your refund policy still carries the default wording, or says 30 days when your customer service team quietly honours 60, that is what the agent now has on file, and it did not wait for your approval.
The storefront-scanned facts behave differently. Shopify drafts them and holds them unpublished until you say yes. So the practical picture in most stores today is: policies and contact details live, everything else drafted and waiting. Neither half is a problem if someone has read it. Both halves are a problem if nobody has.
Why does the 1,000-fact cap matter?
Because it turns the knowledge base from a dumping ground into an editorial decision. One thousand sounds generous for a small store. It is not generous for a brand with twenty collections, country-specific shipping rules, a wholesale programme, several warranty tiers and a help centre with 300 articles. Shopify's own migration note tells you how common that is: it built a separate path for stores whose old app held more than 1,000 facts, and emailed them. If you are one of them, nothing moved, and you are choosing which facts an agent gets to know before January.
The useful way to think about it: an agent needs the facts that decide a purchase or prevent a return, not the facts that fill a help centre. Shipping destinations, delivery times, return window and conditions, warranty length, gift options, payment methods, how to reach a human, and the handful of questions your support inbox answers every day. Those are a few dozen facts, not a thousand. The cap is a budget, and most of it should stay unspent.
The two conclusions that both get this wrong
Publish all and move on, Shopify wrote it from our own site
Shopify wrote it from your site as it is, not as you believe it is. Every store we look at has at least one page that contradicts another: a shipping page that still promises free delivery over $75 after the threshold moved to $100, a FAQ that says 14 days next to a policy that says 30. A human reads around that. An agent that has been told the knowledge base is the source of truth will repeat whichever version got drafted, confidently, to someone about to pay. Reading the drafts is the job. Publish all is the button for after you have done it.
We'll leave it unpublished, so the agents can't say anything wrong
Your admin-linked facts are already published, so silence is not on offer for policies and contact details. And an agent that finds no answer in the knowledge base does not go quiet. It reads your pages or someone else's, or it says it does not know and the shopper moves on to a store that answered. Unpublished is not the same as safe. It is just an answer you did not write.
What should you do this week?
- Open Sales channels > Agentic > Knowledge base in your admin and read the Published facts tab first. That is what agents already have. Fix anything wrong at the source, in Settings > Policies or your contact page, and let the fact update.
- Then read the drafts, category by category. There are ten: about the store, brand and identity, company policies, contact, gift services, payment, returns and warranty, second hand, fulfillment, and additional facts. Approve what is right, reject what is stale, and note every page a wrong fact links back to.
- Fix the pages, not just the facts. A rejected fact will be drafted again from the same wrong page on the next rescan. Update the FAQ, shipping and policy pages, then request a rescan and allow up to 48 hours.
- Add the facts your pages never stated. Price matching, the real return window your team honours, which countries you will not ship to, what happens with personalised items. Use yes-or-no facts where a yes or no is the answer; they are hard for an agent to misread.
- Spend the budget deliberately. Keep the facts that decide a purchase or prevent a return. Leave the long tail in your help centre.
- If you had the old app with more than 1,000 facts, find Shopify's email, decide what survives, and have it re-added and published well before 15 January 2027. Do not let the deadline make the choice.
- If your storefront is password-protected, or you run a custom or headless storefront on the Agentic plan, expect the scan to draft less or nothing. You will be writing additional facts by hand, so start with the few dozen that matter.
- Put a name on it. Policies change at least every holiday season. Whoever updates the returns page now also owns the knowledge base, and both get a date in the calendar.
The genuinely encouraging part
For once the AI channel is asking you for the answer rather than inferring it. A store that spends an afternoon on this page controls what every connected agent says about returns, shipping, gifts and warranties, with a link from each fact to the page that proves it. That is a better position than most brands have ever had with search engines, and it costs an afternoon, a few corrected pages, and a name in the calendar.
Where we fit
This is the same work we do for product data, applied to everything else a shopper asks. Our AI Shopping Visibility engagement makes a Shopify store readable and recommendable by AI agents, and the non-product facts are now part of that: we read every published and drafted fact against the pages and policies it came from, find the contradictions between your shipping page, your FAQ and your policy settings, fix the source pages so the next rescan drafts the right thing, write the missing facts in the shapes agents handle best, and keep the whole set well inside the cap. Our own CortexCommerce platform is how we watch what agents actually say about a store afterwards; its CortexGuard app is live on the Shopify App Store. For a merchant reading this in the week before the holiday rush, retaining us means that by the time a shopper asks an assistant whether your store will take the jacket back, the answer is the one you would have given, and someone is checking it stays that way.
Sources
- Shopify Changelog: Knowledge base is now built into your admin (26 October 2026; the admin location, the app retirement date, the drafting and publish rules, the migration paths)
- Shopify Help Center: Knowledge base (the source-of-truth wording, admin-linked facts published at creation, the 1,000-fact total, fact types, categories, Storefront MCP, rescan timing)
- Search Engine Journal: Shopify Retires Knowledge Base App, Moves AI Agent Facts To Admin (27 October 2026; coverage of the change and the two cap wordings)
- Shopify: Fall '26 Edition: Exponential (28 October 2026; the business-details line, Shop Pay in Muse, Claude Duet, Grok Bot and Instinct, selling in AI Mode and Gemini, the shop.md skill)
- JTS Tech: Your Shopify store is already an agent API (29 September 2026; the Storefront MCP and what it exposes)
- JTS Tech: Agent mistakes start at your returns desk (13 October 2026; why the returns policy is where agent errors land)
- JTS Tech: The AI checks your own site now (19 October 2026; AI assistants going to the official source for facts)
