Shopify has changed what AI shopping assistants can see about a sale. In a changelog entry dated October 9, the company said that Shopify now shares a store's compare-at price with AI shopping agents through Shopify Catalog, so the agents can tell when a product is marked down. Until now, the agents reading Catalog saw only the current price. The markdown prices shown on a storefront were not passed along.
This matters to two groups of people: merchants who build stores on Shopify, and shoppers who ask an AI assistant to find a deal.
What changed
A compare-at price is the higher, crossed-out figure a store shows next to the price you actually pay. On Shopify it is a field on the product. Shopify Catalog is the structured product feed behind its AI shopping features. According to Shopify's help pages, agentic storefronts let customers discover and buy products in AI channels such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta. The same page says agentic storefronts is active by default for eligible stores.
The new detail is in the Catalog Mapping documentation. When the compare-at setting is on, Shopify Catalog sends a compare-at price only if it is higher than the product's current price, and AI agents might use it to advertise strikethrough pricing. The page adds that when the setting is off, Catalog sends only the current price.
The same help page describes how this looks in the Preview tab. For a product whose compare-at price is above its current price, the preview shows the compare-at price with a strikethrough and a badge with the percentage discount. Shopify also notes that the preview is not an exact indicator of how AI channels might view or display product data. In other words, what an assistant finally shows a shopper is up to that assistant.
What merchants control
Merchants get a switch. Shopify's changelog says you can control whether agents can view compare-at prices by reviewing your settings in the admin, in the Compare-at section of the catalog mapping page. The help page gives the path: Sales channels, then Agentic, then Review product data mapping under Shopify Catalog.
Two details are worth reading closely:
- The default. Shopify says your store starts with a default selection, and that changes to how your store uses compare-at prices do not automatically change that selection. The pages we reviewed do not say what the default is for any given store, so check the switch rather than assume.
- Processing delay. The mapping help page notes that changes are processed with a delay, so they might not immediately affect how products inform Shopify Catalog.
For a small business, the practical point is that a compare-at price now travels further than your own product page. If a store leaves old compare-at values on products long after a sale ended, those figures can now be passed to outside assistants. That is a housekeeping job: review which products carry a compare-at price, and whether each one reflects a real earlier price. Rules on how sellers may advertise reference prices differ by country and region, so a merchant with questions should ask a qualified adviser rather than rely on a platform setting.