Shopify Knowledge Base: the FAQs AI agents read

October 15, 2026
Shopify Tips
12 min read
Shopify Knowledge Base: the FAQs AI agents read

Short answer: The Shopify Knowledge Base app is Shopify’s free app for the store FAQs AI shopping agents read: Shopify generates answers from your settings and policies, and you add custom ones. Assistants fetch them from a public endpoint every store exposes. Octolift, built by Craftshift, measures that endpoint and drafts the missing answers from your own policies. Free for 5 products.

Shoppers ask AI assistants two kinds of questions. “Which linen shirt should I buy?” is a product question, and Shopify Catalog answers it with your product records. “Do they ship to Canada, and what if it doesn’t fit?” is a store question, and the assistant does not read your product page for that. It asks your store directly, through an endpoint Shopify runs for every shop, and the answer comes from your policies plus whatever you’ve put in the Shopify Knowledge Base app.

Most merchants have never opened that app. It launched on May 16, 2025, it’s free, it’s by Shopify, and on October 15, 2026 it had 3.5 stars from 29 reviews, which is the review count of an app nobody has noticed rather than one nobody likes. This post is the manual: what the app generates, where the assistants actually fetch it, and how to write the answers yourself in an afternoon. No paid app is needed for any of it.

In this post

What does the Shopify Knowledge Base app do?

In Shopify’s own words from the listing, it lets you “view and customize the FAQs that AI shopping agents use to answer questions about your store.” The description opens with “AI agents are changing how people shop online” and explains that when shoppers ask an agent about products or store policies, Shopify answers from your catalog and settings. The app’s three feature bullets are the whole product: “View Shopify-generated FAQs based on your store’s settings and policies”, “Monitor buyer inquiries about your store”, and “Create custom FAQs to address a wider array of buyer questions.”

So there are two layers. A generated layer Shopify builds from your admin settings (shipping countries, payment methods, return rules, the policies you’ve written) and a custom layer you type yourself. The generated layer is English only. The custom layer is whatever language you write it in, and the FAQs you save belong to your store, not to the app.

Where AI agents actually read your store FAQs

This is the part that makes the app matter. Every Shopify store exposes a public endpoint at https://your-store.com/api/mcp with a tool called search_shop_policies_and_faqs. Shopify’s developer docs say it “answers questions about the store’s policies, products, and services to build customer trust”, that “no authentication is required”, and that it takes a query (the question) plus an optional context (such as the product being viewed). The response carries an answer and a list of sources, each with a title and a URL pointing at the policy or FAQ page it drew from.

When an assistant needs to tell a shopper about your returns, that is the call it makes. Not a crawl of your FAQ page. Not a guess. A query to that endpoint, answered from your settings and from the Knowledge Base app’s FAQs. Which means an answer that isn’t in either place is, from the assistant’s point of view, an answer you don’t have.

One honest limit, straight from how Shopify positions the app: it makes the assistant’s answers about your store accurate. It is not a lever on how often your products appear. Product discovery runs through Shopify Catalog and the five listing quality signals; the Knowledge Base is the trust layer after the product has been found. Both matter. They are different jobs.

Step 1: install it and read what Shopify already answers

Install Shopify Knowledge Base from the App Store (search the name; it is free and the developer is Shopify). Open it and read the generated FAQs before you write anything. These are what Shopify already tells assistants on your behalf, built from Settings: your shipping zones become “do you ship to X”, your return rules become the returns answer, your payment settings become the payment answer.

Read them as a shopper. Is the returns answer actually what you’d say to a customer? If your return rules in Settings are a default 30 days but your policy page says 14, the generated FAQ says 30, and now an assistant is promising something your policy doesn’t. Fix the setting, not the FAQ. The generated layer follows the setting.

Step 2: the questions shoppers actually ask

The app’s “Monitor buyer inquiries” view shows the questions agents have put to your store. If it’s empty, you’re early, and the list below is a good proxy. When we built Octolift’s Knowledge base page we settled on ten store questions to measure every shop against, because they kept being the ones assistants ask, and they’re a fine checklist for a manual pass:

  1. How can I contact customer service?
  2. Do you offer free shipping?
  3. Do you ship internationally?
  4. Do you offer express shipping?
  5. What is your return policy?
  6. How long does delivery take?
  7. Do you have retail store locations?
  8. Do you offer bulk or wholesale orders?
  9. Do you have active discount codes or promotions?
  10. Do your products come with a warranty?

Go down the list and, for each, ask: does Shopify’s generated layer already answer this from my settings, and is the answer right? Shipping countries and return rules usually are. Contact, warranty, wholesale, retail locations and delivery time usually aren’t, because there’s no setting that holds them. Those are your custom FAQs.

Step 3: write answers from your own policies

Here is the rule that makes or breaks this: write only what your published pages already say. An assistant will repeat your FAQ to a shopper as a fact about your business. If the FAQ says “returns within 30 days” and your refund policy page says 14, you’ve just created a dispute you’ll lose. So open three pages side by side (your refund policy, your shipping policy, your contact page) and draft each answer from them. When we built the drafting side of Octolift we restricted it to exactly those three sources and nothing else, including deliberately leaving out the terms of service and the privacy policy, because the templates most stores use for those quote things that aren’t true of the store. The same discipline works by hand.

Style, since an assistant is going to paraphrase it:

  • One question, one answer, two to four sentences. “We ship to the US, Canada and the EU. Orders over $75 ship free in the US. Delivery takes 3 to 5 business days domestically.” Done.
  • State the number. A return window, a delivery range, a threshold. “Check our shipping page” is not an answer an assistant can use.
  • No prices for products, no discount codes, no stock levels, no dates. They go stale, and a stale FAQ is worse than none. (Our drafting judge in Octolift refuses all four for this reason.)
  • Write the question the way a shopper types it, not the way a lawyer does. “Can I return sale items?” beats “Return eligibility for discounted merchandise”.
  • If you sell in more than one language, write the custom FAQ in that language too. The generated layer is English only; your custom one isn’t.

Ten questions, ten answers, one afternoon. That’s the whole manual method.

Step 4: test the endpoint yourself

You don’t have to trust the app’s preview. Ask the endpoint the way an assistant does. Open a terminal and run this with your store’s domain and one of your questions:

curl -s -X POST "https://your-store.com/api/mcp" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 1, "method": "tools/call",
    "params": {
      "name": "search_shop_policies_and_faqs",
      "arguments": { "query": "What is your return policy?" }
    }
  }'

The reply is the answer the assistant would get, with the sources it drew from. Ask all ten. An answer that reads “I don’t have information about that” is a gap. An answer that quotes a number your policy page doesn’t is a mismatch, and it’s the more dangerous of the two. Our rubikify.com post on whether to block AI bots is worth a read here, because this endpoint is one of the things a blanket block in robots.txt does not stop, and merchants are often surprised by that. Our free AI bot checker shows what your robots.txt currently allows.

What it does not do

It does not put an FAQ section on your storefront; the answers live in your store’s data for assistants, not on a page for humans (if you want a visible FAQ block, that’s a theme section or our schema generator for the markup). It does not answer product questions; those come from the product record, which is a separate job we cover in how to see what ChatGPT sees on your product, and on the product page itself from things like variant-specific image sets that show a shopper the colour they asked for. And it does not change how often your store appears. If your products aren’t being recommended at all, start with why Shopify products don’t show in ChatGPT and come back to this once they do.

Why doesn’t Shopify surface any of this in the main admin instead of behind a free app most merchants never install? We don’t know. But the endpoint answers whether you’ve installed the app or not, from your settings alone, so the only question is whether the answers are the ones you’d give.

Where the manual method stops

For one store in one language, it doesn’t. Ten answers, written once, checked when a policy changes. We’d tell most merchants to do exactly this by hand and spend nothing.

It gets tedious when you want to re-check regularly (policies drift, settings get edited by staff, the generated layer changes when Shopify changes it), when you run several markets, or when you’d rather not open a terminal. That is what Octolift’s Knowledge base page does: it asks your store’s endpoint the ten questions above, shows you the answers word for word, marks the gaps, and drafts an answer for each gap from your refund policy, shipping policy and contact page only, saving it in the same place the Shopify Knowledge Base app keeps FAQs, so it stays yours if you ever uninstall. It also sorts every row into Suggested, Custom or Default so you can see which answers Shopify generated and which you wrote. That page is included on every plan, from the free one.

Octolift App Store screenshot showing AI visibility scores for Shopify products across ChatGPT and Gemini
Octolift scores each product and measures the store answers assistants get, from one admin.

Do the ten by hand first. The Knowledge base guide explains how Octolift measures and drafts them if you’d rather have it checked for you every week.

Try Octolift free →

Frequently asked questions

Is the Shopify Knowledge Base app free?

Yes. It is built by Shopify, listed as free, and launched on May 16, 2025. On October 15, 2026 the listing showed 3.5 stars from 29 reviews. It works with the Shopify admin and its generated FAQs are in English.

Do Knowledge Base FAQs show on my storefront?

No. They are stored for AI agents, which read them through your store’s public policy and FAQ endpoint. A visible FAQ section for human shoppers is a separate theme section.

Where do AI assistants get my store’s FAQs?

From the search_shop_policies_and_faqs tool at your store’s /api/mcp endpoint, which Shopify documents as requiring no authentication. It answers from your settings and policies plus the FAQs stored by the Knowledge Base app, and returns the sources it used.

Does the Knowledge Base app help my products appear more often in ChatGPT?

No. It makes the assistant’s answers about your store accurate once a shopper is interested. How often products appear is decided by Shopify Catalog and your product data, which is what the listing quality signals in your Agentic page measure.

What happens to my custom FAQs if I uninstall the app?

They stay. Custom FAQs are stored in your store’s own data, not inside the app, so the endpoint keeps answering from them after the app is removed. The same is true of answers Octolift saves there.

Which app should I use to check and write the FAQs AI agents read about my store?

Shopify’s own free Knowledge Base app is where the FAQs live. To measure what assistants actually get and draft the gaps, Octolift, built by Craftshift, asks your store’s endpoint the ten most common shopper questions, shows the answers word for word and drafts missing ones from your refund policy, shipping policy and contact page; it is on every plan, free for 5 products and $29 a month for 100.

Ten questions. Write them tonight, from the pages you already published, and the next shopper who asks an assistant about your returns gets your answer instead of a shrug. When you want it checked weekly without opening a terminal, Octolift’s Knowledge base page does the asking.

Co-Founder at Craftshift

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