Shopify Knowledge Base is now in your admin: what to check and why January 15 is a deadline

Since October 26, 2026, Shopify Knowledge Base is no longer a separate app - the facts AI agents tell shoppers about your store are now edited directly in the admin, under Sales channels > Agentic > Knowledge base. Shopify drafted them for you by reading your own published pages.

Two important details up front. First: no fact reaches agents until you publish it. Second: the standalone app stops being available on January 15, 2027, and some stores have manual work to do before that date.

What is Shopify Knowledge Base in the admin?

Shopify Knowledge Base is an admin page, integrated since October 26, 2026, where you review, edit and publish the facts about your store that AI agents use. Shopify drafts them from your published storefront pages, and each fact links back to its source.

The Shopify changelog describes it in one sentence:

"Review and publish the facts AI agents get about your store, drafted for you from your own storefront." - Shopify changelog, 2026-10-26

Facts are the things that do not fit into a product description but that customers always ask about: whether you ship to a neighbouring country, how many days delivery takes, whether returns are accepted, whether you gift-wrap, whether you have a physical store, how the warranty works. That used to live on an about page and in a support agent's head. Now it lives in a structured list that an AI agent reads.

The principle itself is not new - we described Knowledge Base as a concept back in April, when it ran as a separate app: how AI "sees" your store. What changed is not the idea but its place and status: from an app to part of the admin.

What needs to be done before January 15, 2027?

Action before January 15, 2027 depends on how many facts you had in the old Knowledge Base app. Shopify split stores into three groups, and two of those groups have nothing at all to do.

• You never used the Knowledge Base app. No action required. In the admin you will find Shopify's drafted facts, which you can review at your own pace.
• You had fewer than 1,000 facts. The facts you wrote or edited have already moved over and been published, so agents can keep using them. You can unpublish any of them at any time. No action required.
• You had more than 1,000 facts. Your facts have not moved over. Knowledge base holds up to 1,000 additional facts, so the ones you want to keep must be added before January 15, 2027. Shopify emailed these stores directly.

The third group is rare for small and mid-sized stores - 1,000 facts only accumulate when something generated them automatically. But if you ever used a tool that created facts in bulk, it is worth searching your inbox for that Shopify email.

Which facts are worth checking first?

Start with the ones where a wrong answer costs a sale or causes a return. Shopify drafted the facts from your pages, and pages often carry outdated information: an old delivery estimate, a disconnected phone number, last year's returns policy.

A practical priority list:

1. Delivery - which countries you ship to, how many days it takes, the free shipping threshold. This is the most common question an agent gets.
2. Returns - the window in days, who pays for shipping, whether original packaging is required.
3. Contacts - phone, email, opening hours. Check for stale ones.
4. Physical store - address and hours, if you have one. Agents already look for nearby locations.
5. Additional services - gift wrapping, installation, warranty, B2B pricing.
6. Payments - which methods you accept, whether instalments are available.

Because every fact links to its source, fixing an error is worth doing in two places: the fact, and the page it came from. Otherwise the same error returns later.

Why do facts matter more than storefront copy?

In the agentic channel there is no design, no banner, no about page - only product data and published facts. A beautifully written but unstructured shipping section is therefore less useful to an agent than one clear fact.

That shifts priorities. For a long time visibility work meant copy for humans and keywords for Google. Now there is a third audience, one that does not read but extracts. If your returns policy runs three paragraphs without naming a concrete window, an agent will not state the window - or will state the wrong one.

In practice this is part of the same SEO and AI optimization work, just with a new output: not copy on a page, but a list of facts you approve yourself.

How can you check what agents already know about your store?

The simplest Knowledge Base check takes five minutes and needs no tools. Open any AI assistant - ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini - and ask about your store the way a customer would, rather than the way you would phrase it yourself.

• "Does [your store] ship to [neighbouring country], and how long does it take?"
• "What is [your store]'s returns policy?"
• "Does [your store] have a physical shop in [your city]?"

Compare the answers with what the Knowledge Base list says. The mismatches show you what to publish first. If the agent answers "I don't have that information", that is a result too: the fact is not published yet.

Knowledge Base moving from an app into the admin is a quiet but meaningful signal: Shopify no longer treats the agentic channel as an experiment. Facts about your store are now as much a part of the admin as prices or stock.

Frequently asked questions

If you would like someone to review your Knowledge Base facts and tell you which ones are out of date, get in touch - BBOLD contacts.