How to track Perplexity traffic on Shopify

Perplexity answers shopping questions with a short list of products and numbered source links, and a link usually points at one product or collection page, not your home page. So on Shopify there are two things worth knowing: which products Perplexity is sending shoppers to, and whether any of those shoppers bought. Shopify's own reports answer the first well and the second only partly. Here is where to look.

Step 1: Find Perplexity in Sessions by referrer

1. In Shopify admin, go to Analytics → Reports.
2. Filter the list to the Acquisition category and open Sessions by referrer.
3. Search the referrer list for perplexity. The only host to look for is perplexity.ai.
4. Widen the date range to 90 days. Perplexity has a much smaller audience than ChatGPT, so a month of data on a small store can be a handful of sessions.

Shopify sorts every referrer into a referring channel, referring platform, referring medium and traffic type. Those groupings were built around search engines and social networks, so don't count on a tidy “AI” bucket. Search for the host name itself instead of trusting the grouped rows.

Step 2: See which products Perplexity links to

A session count on its own doesn't tell you much. What you want is the page each Perplexity shopper landed on. In the report editor, add a landing page column next to the referrer, or open Shopify's landing page sessions report and filter it to the Perplexity referrer. The exact column names vary a little between Shopify plans and report versions, so look for “landing page” in the column picker.

The result is a short list of product and collection URLs. Treat it as a to-do list: those are the pages Perplexity is quoting, so check that the price, stock status, shipping details and reviews on them are current. A shopper who arrives from an AI answer has already compared you with two or three other stores and will leave quickly if the page disagrees with what they were just told.

Step 3: Look for Perplexity in sales, not only sessions

Shopify's acquisition reports show visitors only, not orders. For money, use two other places:

• Total sales by referrer. This report sits with the sales reports and credits each order to a referrer. Search it for Perplexity the same way.
• The order itself. Open any order and find the Conversion summary section, then click View conversion details. It shows where the customer's first visit came from and their visits before buying. Shopify notes that these details can take up to 48 hours to appear.

The conversion summary is the quickest way to check a single order by hand. It can be empty, though. Shopify lists three reasons: an app or private browser stopped the tracking cookie, the order began as a draft order, or the order did not come through your Online Store.

Step 4: Know what happens when the purchase stays inside Perplexity

That last reason matters more for Perplexity than for other assistants. Perplexity has added shopping features that let shoppers in the US buy from participating merchants without leaving the conversation. If your store takes part and a customer buys that way, there may be no ordinary storefront visit behind the order, so there is no perplexity.ai session to find in Sessions by referrer. Look at the order's sales channel and its conversion summary instead, and don't read a flat referrer report as proof that Perplexity is sending you nothing. Shopify also now has an Agentic storefronts page in the admin that reports how your products perform across the AI channels Shopify connects your catalog to. Shopify's announcement names ChatGPT, Shop and Copilot, so check whether Perplexity appears there for your store before relying on it.

Step 5: Don't wait for a UTM tag

On Shopify, ChatGPT visits can often be rescued by their utm_source=chatgpt.com tag when the referrer is missing. Perplexity's links usually carry no UTM at all, so the UTM columns in your reports will be blank for it. What Perplexity does do fairly reliably is pass its referrer. The visits you lose are the ones where a shopper copies your product link out of the answer and opens it later, or sends it to someone else. Shopify records those as direct traffic, and nothing in the admin can recover them.

Step 6: Check your store's robots.txt

Perplexity can only cite products it is able to read. Shopify generates robots.txt for every store, and by default it lets crawlers fetch your public pages while keeping them out of the cart, checkout and admin. The risk is a custom rule added later. Open yourstore.com/robots.txt in a browser and look for a Disallow line under PerplexityBot. If you find one, it lives in the theme's robots.txt.liquid template: go to Online Store → Themes, open the menu next to your theme, choose Edit code and look under templates. A developer or an SEO app may have added it.

What Shopify shows for Perplexity, and what it misses

What the shopper did	What Shopify records
Clicked a source link in a Perplexity answer and browsed	A session from perplexity.ai
Clicked through and bought in the same visit	Order credited to Perplexity in sales by referrer and the conversion summary
Bought inside Perplexity, where your store takes part	An order, possibly with no storefront session behind it
Copied the product link and opened it later	Direct
Saw your store named, then searched for it on Google	Google search
Blocked cookies or used a private browser	An order with an empty conversion summary

The pattern is the same as for every assistant: what you can see is the minimum, not the total. Our post on why AI attribution undercounts explains the reasoning.

Other assistants to check while you're there

Run the same search for chatgpt.com, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com and claude.ai. ChatGPT behaves differently enough on Shopify to need its own steps, covered in ChatGPT traffic on Shopify. For Perplexity on other platforms, start from the general Perplexity tracking guide.

Seeing Perplexity orders in one place on Shopify

Which AI Sent gives Perplexity its own row, apart from ChatGPT and the other assistants, and follows each visit to the lead or sale. It also asks customers “How did you first hear about us?” so buyers who never clicked a link are counted, and labels those answers separately from tracked visits. Our one-click Shopify app is still in Shopify's app review. Until it is approved, Shopify stores connect by adding one line of code, and the setup page walks you through where to paste it. See all integrations.