Shopify
Connecting a Shopify store, what RankX AI reads and writes back, how each change is checked, choosing AI Shopping products, and how undo works on Shopify.
Shopify is a direct store connection, separate from the WordPress one and set up differently: you create a small app inside your own Shopify organisation and paste two credentials into RankX AI. There is no RankX AI app holding a key to your store.
Connecting a store
You create the app in your own Shopify Dev Dashboard, by design: the connection uses Shopify's client-credentials grant, which works when the app and the store belong to the same Shopify organisation. So the app is yours, there is no Shopify app review in the way, and disconnecting is uninstalling your own app.
Release the version before you install the app. Shopify fixes an app's permissions at the moment it is installed. Install first and the installed copy holds none of them, releasing again does not reach back into it, and a custom app gets no re-approval prompt. Nothing in Shopify warns you, and the result looks exactly like wrong credentials.
Open the Shopify Dev Dashboard
Pick the organisation that owns your store. The app and the store must belong to the same one; this connection type does not work across organisations.
Create an app, starting from the Dev Dashboard
Give it a name you will recognise later, such as RankX AI.
Paste the permissions into the Versions tab
RankX AI shows the exact list with a copy button when you open the connect dialog. It covers products, content and files, the channels a product is published to, and the one permission a redirect needs.
Release the version
Permissions do nothing until the version is released. This step is easy to miss and nothing works without it.
Install the app on your store
Click the app's name in the sidebar, choose Install app, and pick your store. Install after releasing, never before: see the warning above.
Copy the credentials into RankX AI
Open Settings, then Credentials, and copy the Client ID and Client
Secret. In RankX AI, open the Website's settings and its Integrations section,
open the Shopify card, and paste them with your store name. The store name is the
my-store part of admin.shopify.com/store/my-store.
Press Test connection afterwards. RankX AI reports what it learned about the store, so you can see it did not ask for more than it needed.
Adding a permission later means reinstalling
Because permissions are fixed at install time, adding one is not a settings change. Release a new version with the extra permission, uninstall the app in your Shopify admin, install it again, and check the Credentials screen in case reinstalling issued a new secret. RankX AI names which of these cases it hit rather than saying the credentials are wrong, because sending you to redo a step you did correctly is worse than saying nothing.
What RankX AI reads once you are connected
- Every product, with its search title, meta description, category, vendor, and whether it is actually published to the online store.
- Products nobody can see: unpublished, draft, archived or out of stock, each with the reason it is invisible.
- Search titles and descriptions with gaps, missing or over length, on products and on collections, counted separately.
- Images with no alt text, listed by file, with the real total stated when the list is capped.
- The products you choose for AI Shopping. With AI Shopping switched on, you search the connected store and choose the products RankX AI monitors in assistant answers, and the chosen set stays current against the store.
Every count states what it was measured against. A lane that could not run says so rather than rendering as a clean result, because "your collections are fine" and "we could not read your collections" are different facts.
The store diagnosis runs on a button rather than in the background, because it pages your whole catalogue through your own credential and would otherwise spend your store's rate limit on a panel nobody opened.
What RankX AI writes
Six things, each checked the same way:
| Change | Detail |
|---|---|
| Search title and meta description | On a product, collection, page or article. The text a search engine or an assistant shows |
| Image alt text | On a file in your store. The only description of an image an assistant or a screen reader can read |
| Redirects | For an address that is genuinely gone, pointing at a page on the same store |
| The description body | Of a product, collection, page or article. Shopify stores these as plain HTML with no page-builder data behind them, so a replace is a replace, and it is checked like any other change |
| Blog articles from Content Studio | An approved Content Studio article published to a blog on your store, with its search title and meta description. RankX AI creates the article, updates it, and unpublishes it. Publishing is immediate or as a hidden draft; scheduling for a later date is a WordPress option |
| Listing-copy proposals from AI Shopping | A rewrite of a product's search title, meta description and description, built only from facts already in your own product text. Proposing spends credits, with the live price shown before you ask, and applying is free. Nothing is written until you approve it. The product title is never proposed, because it is what RankX AI matches your product on in assistant answers |
The search metadata, alt text and redirect writes also reach an AI assistant over MCP. The body replace, blog publishing and listing-copy proposals stay on RankX AI's own write path, in the product.
What is refused is refused whatever asks for it. Price, compare-at price, stock level, status, published state, variants, SKU, barcode, the product address and collection membership are all on a read-only list the write planner checks before anything else. Status is the sharp one, and the reason the list exists: Shopify accepts a status change, and setting a live product to draft takes it off the storefront entirely, which looks tiny in a diff and removes the page from the internet.
How a change is checked
- RankX AI reads what is there now, from the store itself, immediately before the change. Never from a copy it already holds: a change built on a stale reading quietly undoes everything that happened since, and no amount of checking afterwards catches it, because the store then matches exactly what was sent.
- A change it could not read the current value for is refused. A refusal rather than a warning, because that reading is the only record of what the field held before.
- Every change dry-runs first, showing the exact before and after. The dry run is the same code with a flag, not a second implementation of it.
- The object is read back and compared. The comparison allows exactly what Shopify itself changes on the way in, the line breaks it adds between blocks and the characters it decodes, and nothing else. An escaped angle bracket is never treated as a real tag, so a table that went missing still fails.
A change RankX AI cannot confirm is reported as unconfirmed, never as success. Unconfirmed does not mean it failed: it may well have landed, and saying that is more useful than a status code, which proves nothing on its own.
Redirects behave differently on Shopify, and it matters
Shopify's redirects are a first-class readable object, so RankX AI creates them directly in the store. On WordPress, RankX AI adds redirects through a redirect manager it can read back: the Redirection plugin, Rank Math with the RankX AI plugin, or the RankX AI plugin on its own (see the WordPress integration). Two Shopify rules travel with every redirect and are stated on the result:
- A redirect only works on an address that is genuinely gone. One created for a page that still loads is inert, and is never reported as a fix.
- Shopify deletes a redirect by itself the moment the original address starts working again. So a redirect verified today is not verified for ever, and each verification is stamped with its moment rather than cached as a permanent fact.
Undo on Shopify is RankX AI's own record. Shopify keeps no version history for products, collections, pages or articles, so unlike WordPress there is no revision to roll back to. What exists instead is the value RankX AI read immediately before the change, recorded so it can be put back. That record is the whole of the undo, and it is exactly why a change RankX AI could not read the current value for does not happen at all.
From an AI assistant
Six Shopify tools are on the MCP server: describing a store, listing products, diagnosing it, writing search metadata, writing image alt text, and creating a redirect. Each one is documented in the Shopify tool reference.
All six sit behind the publish scope, including the three that only read. A
token granted read access alone cannot reach a Shopify store at all. That is
deliberate rather than an oversight: a token that can page a whole catalogue
using your stored credential is not a read in the ordinary sense. See
MCP authentication.
The in-product Chat is different, and narrower on purpose. It can run the three Shopify reads for free, so you can ask what is wrong with your store, which products nobody can see, and which images have no alt text. Store changes stay out of the conversation by design. The reason is the one above: the only undo is the record RankX AI takes, and a change resting on that record is not one to hand to an agent acting on its own.
Shopify and AI Shopping
You choose which Shopify products AI Shopping monitors. AI Shopping matches product cards against the products you monitor. With AI Shopping switched on, you search the connected Shopify store and choose those products, and the chosen set stays current against the store; a product file you upload works too, and a Shopify export is recognised as it comes. See the product catalogue.
The two are separate questions and worth keeping separate: AI Shopping answers whether an assistant recommends your products; this page covers what RankX AI reads and writes on the store itself.
Where to go next
- Troubleshooting connections, including what to do when a connection reports no permissions.
- The integrations overview, for the rules every write obeys and the actions RankX AI keeps under your control.
- The MCP server, for driving all of this from an assistant.
Last updated
WordPress
Connect WordPress to RankX AI in one click or with an Application Password, add the optional RankX AI plugin, and see what RankX AI writes and how it checks.
Troubleshooting connections
What to do when a WordPress, Shopify, Google or Bing connection stops answering in RankX AI. Symptom first, with the difference between a refusal and a zero.