Shopify co-developed UCP with Google and announced it in January 2026. As of Shopify's Spring '26 rollout, agentic storefronts are active by default for eligible stores, meaning most Shopify merchants already have a UCP-compatible setup running without doing anything. This guide is mainly about checking, configuring, and verifying that setup, not building a manifest from scratch.
Step by step
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Check whether it is already active
In your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Sales channels and look for the Agentic storefronts section. Per Shopify's documentation, this is active by default for eligible stores, so there is a real chance nothing needs to be turned on.
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Review each AI channel
Open Sales channels > Agentic to see the individual channels: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta. Each shows its own status. Shopify's documentation notes that Google AI Mode and Gemini specifically are in early access and not yet available to every store.
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Decide who manages it
Leave Allow Shopify to manage for me turned on to stay automatically enrolled in new AI channels as they roll out, or turn it off to configure catalog access and checkout behavior for each channel yourself.
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Set checkout behavior per channel
For each agentic storefront, choose Allow customers to purchase directly in this sales channel to let the AI platform complete checkout itself, or leave it deselected to redirect the customer to your online store to finish the purchase.
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Confirm your products are actually discoverable
Products marked Unlisted are hidden from AI channels, and also from search engines and your own site search, per Shopify's documentation. If a product is not showing up to agents, this is the first thing to check.
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Verify the manifest is actually live
This is the one step Shopify's docs do not walk you through directly. Check
https://your-store-domain/.well-known/ucpyourself, or run it through our checker, to confirm the manifest Shopify generates is present and correctly structured for your specific domain. -
Monitor agentic orders
Orders placed through ChatGPT show up under the Total sales by referrer report in Analytics > Reports. For other agentic storefronts, orders are filtered from Settings > Sales channels directly.
Permissions you need
To access the Agentic section of Sales channels, you need to be the store owner, or a staff account with both the Products > View and App and sales channel > Agentic permissions, per Shopify's documentation.
Headless and custom storefronts
If your store runs on a custom or headless setup, such as Hydrogen, rather than Shopify's standard online store, this is a genuinely less settled case. A thread on Shopify's own developer community forum shows merchants in exactly this situation working through where their manifest actually gets served, in one case finding it published on their checkout subdomain rather than their primary domain, and asking whether they need to proxy or redirect it themselves. If that is your setup, we would check both your main domain and your checkout domain directly rather than assume either one.
Confirm your setup is actually working
Whatever your setup, the one thing worth doing directly is checking that the manifest is present and correctly structured.
Frequently asked questions
No. Shopify generates and serves the manifest as part of its built-in Agentic storefronts sales channel, which is active by default for eligible stores. You do not write or upload a JSON file yourself.
Not according to Shopify's own documentation. Agentic storefronts is a built-in sales channel managed from Settings > Sales channels in your Shopify admin, not a separate app you install from the Shopify App Store.
It is active by default for eligible stores, but Shopify's documentation notes that Google AI Mode and Gemini specifically are in early access and not yet available to all stores.
This case is less clearly documented. Discussion on Shopify's own developer community forum shows merchants running custom storefronts, for example on Hydrogen, working through how the manifest gets served, in some cases finding it published on their checkout subdomain rather than their main domain.