What is Shopify Sidekick
Shopify's Help Center describes Sidekick as an AI-enabled commerce assistant in the Shopify admin that gives guidance, generates content, builds apps and completes tasks in everyday language, working within the context of the store and presenting changes for review before applying them.
It works in two modes: a chat you start from any admin page, and Sidekick Pulse, which surfaces recommendations on the admin Home. It takes text, voice and screen sharing, and on Apple Watch it answers by voice. It uses the page you are on as context; if you ask from Analytics, it can use that page's data in its response. It remembers past conversations and recent admin activity to personalize responses.
Shopify Sidekick features for analytics
Shopify documents four analytics tasks: generating ShopifyQL queries in the query editor to build new explorations or customize existing reports; displaying line, donut or bar visualizations; exporting the generated report to CSV, Parquet, JSONL or XML, with export links that expire after 10 minutes; and directing the merchant to a custom data exploration for the criteria given.
Shopify's example prompt on that page asks for sales, costs, profits, returns and discounts for the top 100 products.
Sidekick reads the context of the report you have open, whether a default report or your own exploration, and produces a valid ShopifyQL query to match. Every default Shopify report is itself a ShopifyQL query against the store's database, shown in the editor.
That last fact is the one that matters for grading. Sidekick's analytics answers come from Shopify's own store database, orders, products, customers, sessions as Shopify counts them, and not from a Google property or any pixel you installed.
Where Sidekick's numbers and Google's part ways
Shopify documents why its analytics and third-party tools like Google Analytics disagree: page reloads and unique visitors counted differently; sessions defined differently, including whether bots count; visitors who block JavaScript or cookies; browser extensions that block Google's tracking; reporting time zones; and tracking mechanisms that are proprietary and never shared.
Shopify also documents that when a cookie banner is active in a region, data is collected only after consent, and that this reduces session counts and metrics built on them, conversion rates included.
So a question like "how does my conversion rate compare with GA" has two tables behind it, filled by two different mechanisms, under two different consent behaviours. Sidekick's documented analytics tasks read the first. The second is filled by the pixels on your storefront.
The storefront side: pixels, the data layer and consent
Shopify's developer documentation describes web pixels as sandboxed JavaScript that subscribes to customer events published to a Shopify data layer or event bus, and transforms them for the pixel's collection endpoint. A Google Tag Manager custom pixel subscribes to those events and pushes them to GTM's dataLayer, mapping Shopify events such as checkout_completed and product_viewed to GA4 events such as purchase and view_item.
Three documented limits shape what reaches Google from that route: Google Tag Assistant's troubleshoot feature does not detect tags inside a custom pixel; GA4's enhanced measurement events are not triggered automatically inside the sandbox and must be built by hand; and Shopify does not support adding custom data to standard events. Consent Mode v2, where used, is activated by a code snippet inside the custom pixel.
None of that is Sidekick's fault. All of it decides whether a question that crosses from the store database to the pixel data can be answered.
How we grade a Sidekick answer
The row is the same as for any agent: the question, the answer and query as given, the measured truth, the evidence, one of six classes. Rubric on /how-we-grade.
For store-database questions, the truth is a direct query of the same data, and the grading checks whether Sidekick's ShopifyQL asked what the merchant meant: the right date range, the right sales metric, returns handled the way the question implied.
For questions that touch the storefront, sessions, conversion, anything compared with Google, the truth is measured on the storefront: which events the pixel publishes, which reach the endpoint, in which consent state. Method on /tracking-audit and /consent-mode-v2.
Shopify's own instruction that Sidekick presents changes for review before applying them is the right posture for its answers too. Review is what the audit does, forty questions at a time.
Is Shopify Sidekick free
The Help Center pages we read describe Sidekick as part of the Shopify admin and carry no separate price for it. Sidekick is not available in a mobile browser; the Shopify app is required on phone or tablet.
For Google Analytics on Shopify, the pixel setup and its audit, see shpf.webclat.com when it ships. The object the pixel writes to is explained on /data-layer; the engagement is on /answer-audit; the method for the category is on /ai-agent-evaluation.