Quietly, in a developer changelog rather than a keynote, Shopify did something that moves the "should my store be usable by AI agents?" question from someday to already done: it turned WebMCP tools on by default for every Liquid storefront (and the Hydrogen developer preview). In Shopify's own words — "there's nothing to install or configure."
If you run a Shopify store on a standard theme, an agent-callable interface to your catalog and cart is probably live on your site right now, and you didn't do anything. That's a big deal, and it's also easy to over-read. Here's exactly what shipped, and — the part the changelog doesn't dwell on — where it stops.
What actually shipped
WebMCP is the browser standard (currently in Chrome's origin trial) that lets a site expose tools — real functions an in-browser AI agent can call — instead of forcing the agent to scrape the DOM and guess. Shopify has now pre-registered a set of these tools on your storefront for you. From their docs, the lineup is roughly:
Catalog: search_catalog, browse_store, get_product, show_variant
