Shopify Sidekick: what changed on your store, and when

The short version. Rabbot now answers questions inside Shopify Sidekick, the assistant built into your Shopify admin. Sidekick already reads your store as it stands now: products, prices, inventory, orders. What it cannot know on its own is whether the thing you are asking about has been broken since Tuesday. Rabbot has been checking, so it hands over that half: what is open, when it started, what has cleared, and which admin screen fixes it. Six read-only tools, every answer drawn from the last completed check, nothing about your orders, your customers or your ad channels.

Shopify calls Sidekick “an AI-enabled commerce assistant in your Shopify admin” and says it “can also work with third-party apps to answer questions and complete tasks”. As of today Rabbot is one of those apps, and the surface is Shopify’s work. What I decided is what Rabbot says there, and what it refuses to say.

Sidekick is good in the present tense. Ask it what is out of stock and it reads your admin, the record of what you meant to publish. Two things sit outside it. The first is time: the admin holds a product’s current state, not a dated log saying its page returned a 404, the error a browser gets when an address points at nothing, from Tuesday morning until Thursday lunchtime. The second is the view from outside: what a shopper’s browser or Google’s crawler gets back from that page over the public internet. A product can be published, in stock and correctly priced in the admin while the live page comes back with no add to cart button, or carrying a noindex line, the instruction that tells Google not to list that page at all.

Anyone can open your fridge and tell you the milk has gone off. Only someone who was in the kitchen on Tuesday can tell you the door has been open since then. Sidekick opens the fridge. Rabbot is the one who was in the kitchen with a notebook.

What Rabbot hands over

My side of this is a Sidekick data extension, Shopify’s name for a small set of tools an installed app publishes for Sidekick to call. Shopify’s developer documentation sets one rule for that kind of extension: it “must only be used for retrieving data from your app”. Rabbot publishes six and writes nothing.

The one you will reach for most lists what is stopping sales as of the last check: a product page that is dead or returning a 404, a landing page throwing errors, a password page left switched on, a missing add to cart button, stock that disagrees with your admin. It groups them per product, with the page and when each started. Next to it sits the whole-store summary: open counts by severity, and the pages, checks and days it covers.

Two narrower tools sit under those. One lists open problems in a single area: search, storefront, or the site itself, which covers robots.txt, sitemaps and domain redirects. The other takes one product, by ID, handle or web address, and reports when that page was last checked, whether it could be bought, the state of its structured data, the hidden summary in a page’s code that tells Google the price and the stock, and every open problem on it.

Another answers “how do I fix this” for a named check on a named page. The last one is the memory: problems Rabbot caught that are now cleared, up to 30 days back, with the page, the check, and how long the gap lasted.

You type the question you would have typed anyway. “Using Rabbot, what is blocking sales?” comes back as that per-product list, a start time on each line. “Using Rabbot, why can nobody buy the Aurora Hoodie?” returns one page’s diagnosis. No crawl goes off because you asked: every answer describes the last completed check, the same record behind your dashboard and alerts.

I delegated the fixes on purpose, and I want to say why. Ask how to sort one out and you get the admin screen to open, why the check matters, whether Rabbot re-checks by itself, and when the state might be deliberate, which you can mark as intentional instead. That guidance deep-links into Rabbot inside your admin. A person applies it: you, or Sidekick with your own permissions and your approval, since Shopify presents changes for your review, and Rabbot confirms the fix on its next check. An alarm that also edits your store is one you have to trust twice. I would rather you trusted it once.

What is sent, and what never is

Rabbot sends Sidekick its check results only when Sidekick asks, while working on a question you put to it. Nothing crosses because a schedule fired.

What never crosses, on any plan: what Google, Meta or TikTok (Beta) reported about your products, any order, sales or customer data (Rabbot holds none of it), tokens, your alert email address, visitor counts, search rankings, index status from any search engine, and any single health score, because one number hides more than it tells.

(Since 8 October 2026 the revenue line, if you switch it on, reads daily sales totals into the Rabbot app. Sidekick still never returns one.)

Here is the part I would want told to me before I trusted any of this. An empty list is not an all-clear. Most weeks there is nothing to report, and “no, nothing is broken” is the true answer. The failure worth guarding against is a clean answer from a check that was never running on your store. So every answer carries its coverage: how many pages are checked against your plan’s cap, how often, which checks are running here and which are not, and what is open outside the question you asked. A page Rabbot could not reach comes back as a monitoring gap rather than a confirmed outage, because those are different facts.

Once an answer has reached Sidekick, Shopify holds it under Shopify’s own terms and privacy policy, as a separate controller rather than as Rabbot’s processor, so Shopify decides what happens to it from there. I cannot take it back once it has gone, and the erasure that follows about 48 hours after you uninstall does not reach it. Section 12 of the privacy notice at app.rabbot.ai/privacy covers what reaches Sidekick and who holds it, section 11 covers the erasure, and section 7 of the terms says the same in contract form.

Getting a useful answer

Wait a few minutes after installing Rabbot, so the first check finishes. The first time Rabbot is asked in a conversation, Sidekick shows a short consent card naming Rabbot and what it will read, which you approve. If Sidekick answers from somewhere else, or says the app is not on in this conversation, start the question with “Using Rabbot,” or switch Rabbot on from the composer’s Apps picker (Add files and more, then Apps).

Two smaller habits matter, and the second exists because I could not design the problem away. Name a product exactly, by its title, handle or web address: a vague name ends the turn with nothing to look up. Sidekick will also answer from earlier in the same conversation rather than asking Rabbot again, which makes the answer as old as the point it came from, and I cannot reach that from my side. Open a new conversation after you fix something and you force a fresh read.

What I wanted you to be able to finish is one sentence: my store is in this state, and it has been since this hour on this day. Sidekick holds the first half already. Rabbot is the half with the notebook open, which is usually the half that decides whether anything needs doing today.

Sidekick answers work on every plan, and every paid plan starts with a 14-day trial. What each tool covers and which questions get a clean answer live in the Sidekick guide.

Sources

• Shopify Help Center, “Sidekick” (help.shopify.com/en/manual/shopify-admin/productivity-tools/sidekick). Supports the description of Sidekick as “an AI-enabled commerce assistant in your Shopify admin”, that it “can also work with third-party apps to answer questions and complete tasks”, and that it presents changes for merchant review before applying them. Checked 2026-09-20.
• Shopify Help Center, “Getting started with Sidekick” (help.shopify.com/en/manual/ai-powered-tools/sidekick/set-up). Supports opening Sidekick from your Shopify Home page or any other page in your admin, that it uses the page you are on as context, and that you can mention installed apps in a conversation. Checked 2026-09-20.
• Shopify, “Sidekick app extensions” (shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/sidekick). Supports what a Sidekick app extension is, and that Sidekick uses each tool’s description to decide when an extension is relevant to a merchant’s question. Checked 2026-09-20.
• Shopify, “Use extensions to surface app data” (shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/sidekick/build-app-data). Supports the quoted rule that a data extension “must only be used for retrieving data from your app”. Checked 2026-09-20.
• Shopify developer changelog, “Introducing Sidekick app extensions”, 10 December 2025 (shopify.dev/changelog/introducing-sidekick-app-extensions). Supports when app extensions became available and that merchants stay in control of what gets updated. Checked 2026-09-20.
• Rabbot privacy notice, sections 11 and 12, and terms of service, section 7 (app.rabbot.ai/privacy, app.rabbot.ai/terms). Section 12 is the canonical source for what Rabbot sends Sidekick and Shopify’s separate controller role, section 11 for the erasure about 48 hours after uninstall. Checked 2026-09-20.