Your Shoppers' AI Can't See Your Loyalty Program. Yet.
Direct Answer Shopify's Sidekick app extension framework, announced in December 2025 and available to app developers, lets apps expose their data and workflows inside Sidekick. Loyalty apps are already there — Sidekick can answer questions about your rewards program from your admin. What it cannot do is make that program visible to the AI your customer is shopping with, or tell you how loyalty is performing in AI channels specifically. Those are separate problems with separate fixes.
There are now two AIs in your business, and most merchants have only met one of them.
The first sits in your admin. You ask it things about your store and it answers, increasingly well, because Shopify keeps giving it more to read.
The second is in your customer's hands. They are in ChatGPT or Gemini or Copilot deciding where to buy, and that assistant is forming an opinion about your store using whatever it can find.
Only one of those has learned to read your loyalty program.
What actually changed in your admin
Shopify announced Sidekick app extensions in December 2025, and app developers can build for it. It comes in two shapes:
- Data extensions are read-only. They let Sidekick search an app's data and answer with its context.
- Action extensions let Sidekick propose a change and take you to the right screen — you approve it, Sidekick does not act alone.
Apps are live in it already, across categories: Klaviyo and Seguno for email, Judge.me and Yotpo for reviews, Loop for returns, Matrixify for bulk operations. Smile: Loyalty Program Rewards is among them — so if you run Smile, you can ask Sidekick about your loyalty program's activity and performance without leaving the conversation.
That is genuinely useful, and we would rather tell you about it than pretend the gap we used to write about is still wide open. If you run a loyalty app, check whether it has a Sidekick extension. If it does, use it.
The half that did not change
Sidekick lives in your admin. It is your assistant, on your side of the counter.
Your customer's assistant is somewhere else entirely, and it has no access to any of this. When a shopper asks ChatGPT to compare two stores selling the same thing, nothing about a Sidekick extension makes your rewards program part of that comparison. The extension framework does not reach across to the buyer.
So the question we have been asking on this blog for a year is still open, just narrower than it was:
Can the assistant your customer is actually shopping with see that you have a loyalty program at all?
For most stores, still no. And that is the side where the money is, because it is the side where the purchase decision happens.
Two blind spots, two different fixes
It is worth being precise about why these do not solve each other.
| Your admin AI | Your shopper's AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Who installs it | You | Your customer, or nobody |
| What it reads | Your apps, via extensions you enable | Public signals it can find on its own |
| What it decides | What you should do next | Where they should buy |
| Loyalty visible? | Yes, if your app supports it | Usually not |
The merchant side is an integration problem, and Shopify has now given developers the tool for it. The buyer side is a discovery problem, and no admin feature can fix it — the signal has to be public, on your storefront, where an assistant can read it without anyone installing anything.
If StabileRewards is on your store, that public signal is already being published for you. You did not have to do anything, and there is nothing to maintain. We have written before about how inconsistently assistants read those signals today — that is honest, and it is why we keep testing rather than claiming.
The number neither AI can give you yet
Here is the one that matters for deciding whether any of this is worth your attention.
Ask Sidekick how your loyalty program is doing and, with the right app connected, it can tell you. Points issued, rewards claimed, program activity.
Ask it how your loyalty program is doing with AI shoppers specifically — how many of the people redeeming arrived from an assistant rather than from search or social — and nothing in your admin ties a redemption back to the assistant that sent the shopper.
That is the gap we built attribution by AI channel to close, because a merchant cannot make a decision about agentic commerce without knowing whether it is producing anything.
Where we actually are
Being specific, including about what is not finished:
Published and working. Your public loyalty signal, and AI-channel attribution on orders. No setup.
Approved in ChatGPT. Our loyalty app is approved and published in the ChatGPT app directory, and its tools read your real program — your earn rate, your tiers, your minimums — rather than sample numbers. When a shopper cannot be identified, it reports that the balance could not be checked rather than reporting zero, so nobody is told they have no rewards when they do.
Working, but not yet for everyone. Merchant-side tools that list customers slipping away and grant them win-back points from inside a conversation. These run against a single store today while we prove the flow out. Generalizing them to every connected shop is the next piece of work, not a shipped feature, and we would rather say so.
What you should do
If you run a loyalty app, find out today whether it has a Sidekick extension, and turn it on. That is free value and it is not ours.
If you want the buyer half — the part where the assistant your customer is using can see your program, and where you can tell AI-channel revenue apart from everything else — that is what we do.
Install StabileRewards from the Shopify App Store ->
Free to install · Pay on results: 1% of reward value redeemed + $0.05 per AI-channel transaction · No charge if no rewards are applied.
Questions, or want to be in the group where win-back gets tested first: get in touch or email support@stabilerewards.com.