From testing top Shopify stores, Bill Hunt found agents can build a checkout, but can’t answer basic delivery or cancellation questions.

In September 2026, Slobodan Manic argued that the text-only versions of websites now being served to AI “strip out the wrong layer.” A markdown mirror describes the page but drops everything a visitor could press, so it becomes “a brochure … served to the user most eager to act.”

He ends with a brilliant three-part list that every ecommerce team should adopt: expose what can be done, make it callable, and report what happened.

I had been running an audit of the top 122 Shopify storefronts with a related question: not whether AI can find or cite these stores, but whether an agent can actually resolve a purchase decision on them. That means having enough information, context, rules, and the capability to execute to answer the buyer’s questions, commit to the purchase, and deal with what comes after.

His article prompted me to go further. Instead of counting which tools the stores declared, I called them. This article reports what we found, confirms his argument, shows where our results differ, and outlines what both merchants and Shopify can do about it.

The platform installed the actions, not the merchants. Manic reports that Shopify switched on WebMCP tools for every Liquid storefront on August 5, and that “the merchants did not build it.” Our data shows the same thing at scale:

md as a sign of merchant readiness, you are really measuring Shopify’s rollout schedule.

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