For most Shopify brands, the Perplexity merchant program is worth two minutes and not much more. Fill in the interest form if you sell to US shoppers, then put your real effort into your product pages, because they’re the one route into Perplexity you fully control.
Here’s why, what the program looks like today, and what to do instead. For the bigger picture of how Perplexity shopping works, see our Perplexity shopping overview.
What the merchant program is today
Perplexity launched its merchant program in 2024 with a blog post. The pitch: share your product data directly, for free, and get a better shot at being a recommended product, plus checkout payments, free API access and a merchant dashboard. It was aimed squarely at “large retailers”.
If you go looking for it now, here’s what you’ll find:
| Where you look | What’s there | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| The signup form from the launch post | Still live: a five-question interest form that says it takes under two minutes | You can register interest. It’s a request to be contacted, not an approval |
| perplexity.ai/merchants | Redirects to a sign-up for Perplexity Computer, an AI tool for ecommerce teams | A different product. Signing up there doesn’t enrol your catalog |
| The merchant program terms | The page no longer loads, and Perplexity’s legal hub doesn’t list it | No current public terms to read before you apply |
| The help center | Explains Instant Buy for shoppers, not how merchants join | No merchant sign-up path documented |
So the program exists as a form and a promise to reach out. There’s no dashboard to log into and no published approval process.
Is Perplexity a Shopify channel?
Not in the way ChatGPT and Copilot are. Shopify’s agentic storefronts pages name the AI channels it sends your products to: ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode and Gemini, and Meta. Perplexity isn’t on the list.
Perplexity’s 2024 launch post did say its shopping was “powered by platform integrations including Shopify”, for stores that sell and ship to the US. Neither company’s current pages say whether that still runs.
Checkout tells a similar story. Perplexity pairs Instant Buy with PayPal in its help center. Perplexity’s own help article says Instant Buy products come from merchants like Wayfair and Abercrombie & Fitch, plus “thousands of other merchants on BigCommerce, Shopware, and Wix platforms”. Shopify isn’t named.
For a Shopify brand, that leaves one route you fully control: Perplexity reading your public product pages, the same way it reads any website.
What Perplexity says it looks for
Perplexity’s help center is unusually direct about this. It says it ranks product listings much like it ranks sources, on “authority and relevance”, then tunes them to each shopper’s past searches and preferences. And it says it’s “more likely to recommend merchants who provide deeper product details such as availability, reviews, pricing, and specifications.”
It also says no one can pay to appear among its related products. Listings are set by “relevance and ratings”.
That gives you a clear to-do list, and none of it needs Perplexity’s permission:
- Availability: say plainly on the page whether each variant is in stock.
- Reviews: show your rating and review count as text, not only as stars in an image.
- Pricing: make the current price, and any sale price, readable on the page.
- Specifications: write the numbers a shopper filters on, with units.
That last one is the easiest to get wrong. For a search like “humidifier for dry winter air large room quiet top fill”, one listing in our saved results printed “21dB”. Another only said it “runs quietly enough to leave on overnight”. The first one answers the shopper’s question; the second one asks the assistant to take its word for it.
Should you fill in the form?
Use this to decide in under a minute.
Fill it in if:
- you sell and ship to US shoppers;
- you could keep a product feed accurate every day if Perplexity asked for one;
- someone on your team would own the relationship if Perplexity replied.
Don’t wait on it if:
- you’re a small or mid-sized Shopify brand (the program was pitched at large retailers);
- you sell mostly outside the US (Instant Buy is for US shoppers);
- your product pages don’t yet show price, stock, reviews and specs as text.
If you tick any box in the second list, the form is still free and takes two minutes. Just don’t plan anything around a reply.
If Perplexity does get back to you
There are no current public terms, so you’ll be working from whatever Perplexity sends. For a sense of what to expect, the last published terms asked merchants to keep their product data accurate and complete at all times, send it by API, SFTP or CSV, ship within their stated lead time and respond to order issues within 72 hours. That’s the kind of commitment to have a plan for before you say yes.
Make sure Perplexity can read your pages
Since your pages are the route, check they’re open. On Shopify, you control crawler access in your store’s robots.txt.liquid template. Shopify notes that these rules only affect the open web: blocking a crawler there doesn’t change what Shopify Catalog sends to ChatGPT or Copilot. So if someone on your team blocked AI crawlers to be safe, they may have shut out Perplexity while leaving the other channels untouched. Check Perplexity’s current crawler names before you edit anything.
Then test it the way a shopper would. Ask Perplexity for one of your products by its exact name, and then ask the question your customers usually ask before they buy. If it finds you by name but never for the question, start with your product page. No program fixes a page that doesn’t answer the question.
Your next step
Pick your best seller and open its product page. Check that availability, rating and review count, price and the two or three specs customers ask about most are all written as plain text near the top. Fix whichever is missing this week. Then, if you sell to the US, spend two minutes on the interest form.