Shopify Knowledge Base: What the App Does and How to Fill It

Key takeaways

• The Shopify Knowledge Base is a free app that holds the FAQs AI shopping agents use to answer questions about your store. The FAQs are not shown on your storefront.¹
• Shopify’s generated FAQs are built from your settings and policies, such as shipping countries and return rules.² Product questions about sizing, care or materials are yours to add.
• On a well-known footwear store we tested, the FAQ tool returned templated policy lines and nothing at all for sizing, washing or delivery-time questions.³
• Start with 20 to 30 short, specific answers to the questions shoppers actually ask, then test them. You can write them in the app, create them in bulk as metaobjects, or have Fudge draft them from your store data.

The Shopify Knowledge Base app holds the answers AI shopping agents give when a shopper asks about your shipping, returns or products. This guide explains how it works, what Shopify fills in on its own, what it leaves blank, and three ways to add the rest.

Looking for a help center that shoppers browse on your site? That is a different thing; see our guide to creating a FAQ page in Shopify.

Why you can trust us

We have worked with hundreds of Shopify brands on their storefronts over the past four years, and Jacques has over 15 years of development experience. We build Fudge, an AI storefront editor with a 4.9 rating on the Shopify App Store. Fudge writes the same question-and-answer records the Knowledge Base app reads, and our free catalog audit queries the same agent tool described below.

What is the Shopify Knowledge Base app?

It is a free app built by Shopify where you view and edit the FAQs AI shopping agents use to answer questions about your store, and see the questions agents are asked.⁴ Shopify announced it in the Summer ‘25 Edition, and it has been on the App Store since May 2025.⁵

The FAQs work behind the scenes. Shopify describes them as a data source for AI platforms, not content displayed on your storefront.¹ A shopper reads the answer inside the AI chat.

It improves accuracy, not visibility. Shopify’s own note says the app does not affect how often your store appears in AI results.¹ Its job is to make sure the shipping window, return terms and product facts an agent repeats are correct.

Shopify ties the app to Agentic Storefronts, its channel for selling on AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. The announcement tells merchants to track policies, FAQs and brand voice in the Knowledge Base app so agents have the right answers.⁶ If you build your own store assistant on the Shopify Agent Platform, its questions are logged in the app too.¹

How agents read your Knowledge Base

One way agents get your answers is a public tool on your store called search_shop_policies_and_faqs, served at your-store.com/api/mcp with no authentication.⁷ Shopify’s documentation says it answers questions about a store’s policies, products and services, such as returns, shipping, product care and warranties.⁷ In our tests it returned the store’s generated FAQs and any custom FAQs the merchant had added.³

Because the tool is public, anyone can check what your store tells agents, including you. We show how further down.

Knowledge Base vs FAQ page vs product page FAQs

The Knowledge Base does not replace the FAQs on your site. Each one reaches a different reader.

What does Shopify fill in automatically?

Shopify gives four examples of the settings it generates default FAQs from:²

• Language settings: which languages your store is available in.
• Customer account settings: for example, whether customers can request returns or pay with store credit.
• Shipping and delivery settings: which countries you ship to and whether you offer local pickup.
• Return rules: the details of your return policy.

The defaults can only be as detailed as those settings. In our tests, questions about sizing, care and delivery times got no answer from the FAQ tool unless the merchant had added one.³

What the FAQ tool returned on a real store

We asked the public FAQ tool of a well-known footwear brand on Shopify five questions a shopper might ask. These are the answers it returned, quoted exactly:³

The first two are Shopify’s generated defaults, which is why they read like a template (the doubled “days” is in the generated answer). For the last three, an agent would have to find the answer somewhere else, such as the product data, if it is there at all.

Fix wrong defaults at the source

You cannot delete a generated FAQ.² When one is wrong or thin, you have two options:

1. Fix the setting it comes from. If the answer says you only ship to the US and you also ship to Canada, your shipping zones are wrong too, and that affects checkout as well as agents.
2. Override the answer. In the app, open the FAQ, click Override next to its source, and rewrite it. Return to default undoes this.²

Merchants have raised problems with the defaults in App Store reviews, including answers that don’t match the store’s real policies and generated questions that stay in English on non-English stores. The app has a 3.5 rating from 29 reviews.⁴

What questions should your Shopify Knowledge Base answer?

Start with the questions shoppers already ask you. The app’s Top unanswered questions list stays empty until your products start appearing in AI shopping conversations.⁸ Until then, take questions from your support inbox, live chat, product reviews and return reasons.

Most stores need the same store-wide set:

• Delivery times by region, and the cost of express shipping
• International shipping, duties and taxes
• Changing or cancelling an order
• How exchanges work, and who pays return shipping
• Payment options, including buy now, pay later
• Gift cards, wholesale and physical store locations

Then add the questions specific to what you sell:

How to write answers AI agents can use

One question per FAQ, phrased the way a shopper asks it. “Do you ship to Canada?” beats “International shipping information”.

Answer first, in one or two sentences. That is Shopify’s own recommendation.² Put the specific fact up front: the number of days, the size advice, the temperature.

Include the conditions and the “no”. If final-sale items cannot be returned, or you don’t ship to PO boxes, say so. An agent can only pass on limits it knows about.

Match your policies and product pages exactly. If the Knowledge Base says 30 days and your refund policy says 14, a shopper hears one number in the chat and reads another at checkout.

Leave out marketing claims and short-lived promotions. “Free shipping this weekend” stays in the Knowledge Base until someone removes it.

Keep the set focused. Our advice is to start with 20 to 30 answers and test after each batch. One developer found the agent tool stopped answering once a store passed roughly 40 FAQs, and Shopify reproduced the problem in December 2025.⁹ Shopify said it shipped improvements in February 2026. Others have reported failures since, most recently in August 2026.⁹

Three ways to fill your Shopify Knowledge Base

1. Add FAQs in the Knowledge Base app

1. Install Shopify Knowledge Base from the Shopify App Store.
2. From your Shopify admin, go to Apps → Knowledge Base and click Add FAQ.
3. Enter the Question, then a one or two sentence Answer.
4. Click Save.

To answer something agents have already been asked, hover over a question in Top unanswered questions and click Answer.² This route suits a few FAQs. The app has no import or export, so a large set means typing each one in.

2. Create FAQs in bulk as metaobjects

FAQs you create or override in the app are saved as metaobjects, which you can also edit under Content → Metaobjects.² Shopify’s help page does not name the definition. In our own integration it is Shopify’s standard question-and-answer definition, type shopify--qa-pair, with required question and answer fields and an optional sources field for links.

To create entries in bulk, make sure that standard definition is enabled (the Admin API’s standardMetaobjectDefinitionEnable mutation does this), then write entries through the Admin API, for example with metaobjectUpsert. For background on custom data, see our guide to AI-generated Shopify metafields.

3. Draft them with Fudge

Fudge reads your products, metafields, pages and policies, drafts question-and-answer pairs from them, and publishes the ones you approve as the same metaobjects the Knowledge Base app reads. Tell Fudge:

“Read my shipping and return policies, product pages and size guides. Draft 25 Shopify Knowledge Base FAQs covering the questions shoppers ask most before buying: delivery times, returns, sizing, care and materials. Keep each answer to two sentences, use the exact numbers in my store, and flag anything you can’t confirm from my store data.”

You review every answer before it goes live. Because the prompt asks Fudge to flag what it can’t confirm, a fact that exists nowhere in your store, such as a delivery time you have never written down, comes back as a question for you. Shopify’s generated defaults stay as they are; fix those in your settings or with Override.

How to test your Shopify Knowledge Base

Use the test tool in the app. In Apps → Knowledge Base, go to the FAQ query log and click Test your knowledge base. Type a question and click Send. The result shows what it Matched to, or Unanswered if nothing matched, and test questions get a Test badge.²

Ask the agent tool directly. This shows what the tool returns to an agent. Replace the domain with your storefront domain:

curl -s -X POST "https://your-store.com/api/mcp" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"tools/call","id":1,"params":{"name":"search_shop_policies_and_faqs","arguments":{"query":"Do you ship to Canada?"}}}'

In our tests the response was a list of matching question-and-answer pairs, or an empty list when nothing matched.

Run a free audit. Our Shopify catalog data audit asks your store’s answer tool a set of realistic shipping, returns and product questions, alongside its checks on your product data.

Watch the query log once you are live. Each entry shows the Agent, the Query, what it was Matched to and the Date, filtered by Answered and Unanswered.⁸ Unanswered questions feed the Top unanswered questions list, which becomes your to-do list.

Where else should your answers live?

Google, AI search engines that crawl your pages, and shoppers on your site never see the Knowledge Base. Put the important answers in visible text as well:

• Store-wide questions on a FAQ page. Our guide to creating a FAQ page in Shopify covers the layout.
• Product questions on the product page, close to the add-to-cart button.
• Structured data, if you want it. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026, but clean markup still labels your answers for machines.¹⁰ See how to add structured data in Shopify.

Knowledge Base entries are store-wide, not attached to products, so a product page needs its own copy of those answers. Fudge can store them per product and show them on the page. Tell Fudge:

“Add an FAQ block to my product template that shows each product’s sizing and care questions as visible text, stored in a product metafield.”

If you keep the same answer in both places, update both when it changes. For the bigger picture, see our guide to building an agent-ready Shopify storefront and how to get your Shopify store to show up in ChatGPT.

What are the limits of the Shopify Knowledge Base?

• One language per FAQ. The app’s interface is English and each FAQ is stored in one language; Shopify suggests a separate FAQ set per language.²
• Generated FAQs cannot be deleted, only overridden or fixed at their source setting.²
• No import or export in the app. Bulk work goes through metaobjects.
• No data until you appear in AI chats. The query log fills up only once agents start surfacing your products.⁸
• Large FAQ sets have been fragile. Test after each batch you add.⁹

FAQ