Shopify Magic Is Now Sidekick: What Changed and How to Use It

Shopify Magic was the umbrella name for the AI features built into the Shopify admin: the icon that wrote product descriptions, the tool that drafted email subject lines, the generator that filled in theme content. If you learned Shopify any time in the last three years, that is the name you know.

Shopify's own documentation no longer uses it. Checked on 28 October 2026, the help pages that carried the name now sit under a section called AI-powered tools, and the body copy on them describes Sidekick — not Magic. The URLs and page titles still contain "shopify-magic", which is why search results, third-party guides and half the tutorials you will find still lead with it. The product language underneath has moved on.

Two things worth being clear about, because the gap between the old name and the new docs causes most of the confusion:

• Nothing was taken away. The text generation icon still works in the same places. The features you used under the Magic name are still there.
• The framing changed. Shopify now presents one assistant — Sidekick — as the way in, and describes the rest as capabilities inside specific parts of the admin rather than as a branded suite.

The practical consequence is small but real: if you search Shopify's documentation or support for "Magic", you will find less and less over time. Search for Sidekick, or for the specific feature you want.

Here is what is actually there, organized by where you find it rather than by what it is called. This is the list as Shopify's documentation describes it.

• Sidekick — a chat assistant in the admin. Ask it for guidance, have it generate content, build custom apps, or complete tasks for you.
• Text generation — the icon inside editors. Writes blog posts, online store pages, product descriptions, Shopify Messaging emails and theme editor content.
• Theme editor — generates custom theme blocks from a text prompt, without code.
• File editor — changes an image from a text prompt, and replaces an image background with a color.
• Shopify Inbox — instant answers and suggested replies to customer messages.
• Themes — generates a personalized theme from a description of your business.
• Products — suggests a product category, and the metafields that go with that category.
• Search & Discovery — sorts the filter values shoppers see on your storefront.
• Customers — writes a plain-language description of each customer segment you create.
• Analytics — projections inside the Customer cohort analysis report.
• Shopify App Store — summarises merchant reviews on selected apps.

Two things sit outside the admin. Tinker is a separate free mobile app that Shopify describes as having more than 100 AI tools for images, videos and brand assets. And the admin now connects to third-party assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Muse, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot — so you can work with store data from those tools, controlling what each one is allowed to see and do.

The built-in generator knows your product title, and not a great deal else. Most disappointing output is a prompting problem rather than a model problem, and five habits fix most of it.

• Give it the facts it cannot infer. Materials, dimensions, who the product is for, what it replaces. A description written from a title alone will be generic because the input was.
• Ask for a constraint, not a vibe. "Two sentences, under 40 words, no adjectives before the noun" produces something usable. "Make it punchy" does not.
• Get one right before you scale. Work a single product description until it is genuinely good, then reuse that prompt as a pattern. Generating 200 at once means editing 200 at once.
• Paste your own best copy as the model. Give it a description that already converts and ask for the same structure and register for a different product. This is the single biggest lever on brand voice.
• Say what not to say. Most weak AI commerce copy fails the same way: superlatives, "elevate your", invented benefits. Rule them out in the prompt and you remove most of the editing.

If you are writing descriptions at catalog scale, the mechanics of doing that well are worth their own read — our guide to Shopify product descriptions covers structure, length and what actually influences conversion.

Shopify is direct about this in its own documentation: "AI outputs can contain errors, so review anything a tool creates or changes." It also notes that some features are not optimized for mobile devices. Four areas are worth a human read every time.

• Claims and compliance. Anything touching safety, health, materials, country of origin, guarantees or regulated categories. A generated sentence does not know what you are allowed to claim.
• Brand voice across a catalog. Output is usually consistent for one product and drifts across two hundred. The drift is hard to see one description at a time and obvious when a customer reads three pages in a row.
• Search structure. The generator writes prose. It does not build a page around a target query, with headings, internal links and a description that earns a click. That is a different job.
• Facts it cannot know. Compatibility, care instructions, exact measurements, what is in the box. Confident wrong detail is worse here than no detail.

The honest summary: it removes the blank page, and it does not remove the edit. Teams that get value from it treat the output as a first draft from a fast junior writer who has never seen the product.

Shopify's documentation says that "many of these features are available at no additional cost, but availability can vary by plan, device, and language." That is as specific as it gets — there is no published per-plan matrix for these features, so the only reliable check is whether the option appears in your own admin.

What that leaves is a reasonable question about where paid help is still worth it. Broadly: the generation is free, and the judgment is not. Catalog-scale editing, brand voice, and structuring pages so they actually rank are where merchants spend money, and they are the parts the built-in tools are least able to do for you. If you want a sense of the going rate before you ask anyone, our guide to Shopify expert costs sets out the ranges.

For the wider picture of AI across a Shopify store — not just what is built into the admin — see our Shopify AI guide. If the job is specifically writing, Shopify product description experts and Shopify copywriting experts do this at volume.