AI Discovery overview
Shoppers increasingly ask AI assistants (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews) for product recommendations instead of searching directly. AI Discovery is Máximo’s set of features for making your catalog readable by those agents, so they can find, cite, and recommend your products.
What it does
Section titled “What it does”Most storefronts are built for human browsers and search-engine crawlers, not for AI agents trying to answer a shopping question in real time. AI Discovery publishes an AI-friendly version of your catalog alongside your normal storefront: structured files agents can crawl directly, structured data on your product pages, and a router file that tells agents where to find all of it. See What you get for the specific artifacts.
Why it matters
Section titled “Why it matters”If your catalog isn’t readable by these agents, you’re effectively invisible in that channel, no matter how good your products or your regular SEO are, an AI assistant can only recommend what it can read and trust. Máximo also reports on this directly: once AI Discovery is on, you can see how often AI crawlers fetch your catalog and how much traffic and revenue AI assistants send to your store.
What Máximo doesn’t do here
Section titled “What Máximo doesn’t do here”AI Discovery is about discovery, helping agents find and understand your catalog. It is not the same as selling directly inside ChatGPT: that’s handled by Shopify’s own Agentic Storefronts, which is separate from Máximo and managed in Shopify admin. The AI channels page links to Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts settings for reference, but Máximo doesn’t configure that feature itself.
Getting started
Section titled “Getting started”AI Discovery is off by default. Turning it on, checking what’s live, and confirming it’s working are covered in Turning it on.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- What you get: the concrete files and page changes AI Discovery publishes.
- Turning it on: enable it and confirm it’s working.