Anthropic launches commerce agents for Shopify stores
It's been a few weeks since the last issue, so there's more than the usual amount to get through. The main story - Anthropic has published an open blueprint for building commerce agents on Claude, and Shopify is already building a reference storefront on top of it.
After that: Google is routing organic clicks through a redirect at google.com/goto, breaking a fair few rank trackers in the process, the Content API for Shopping is switching off, AI Max is auto-upgrading old Search campaigns this month.
There’s also an early alpha release giving Performance Max advertisers much-needed channel-level control, and Matrixify has (finally) patched a bug so it works with Shopify's new Collections model.
We finish on something new we've built ourselves, our new product data sprint service. More on that later in the issue.
On to the news!
Anthropic launches commerce agents built alongside Shopify
On 2 September, Anthropic published an open blueprint for two different commerce agents built on Claude. A shopping agent lives inside a merchant's own app or site, handling product search, comparisons and cart building before handing off to the existing checkout, plus basic customer service such as order status.
For most of our readers though the real point of interest will be the merchant agent, which opens up things like sales analysis, inventory alerts, pricing suggestions and campaign automation (albeit, as Anthropic is keen to make clear, with a person approving anything before it goes live).
The interesting part isn't the idea itself, as plenty of brands have built agents like this before. Anthropic's move is closer to what it did with Claude Code - take something that used to need a specialist team and turn it into something anyone can do. It's also deliberately narrow in that there’s no advertising or attempt to own the checkout process, which is what makes it cooperative rather than competitive with Shopify. Shopify's VP of Product, Vanessa Lee, is quoted on Anthropic's site building a reference storefront on top of it through Catalog, UCP and Shop Sign-in.
From my point of view, this fills an interesting gap. Shopify has spent the last few years shipping the plumbing (Catalog, UCP, Shop Sign-in) without much of a working agent layer on top. With this in place, things could move very quickly.
We may be beating the same drum here, but this is, again, more evidence that product data is the driving force behind all of this. It's part of why we've built our new product data sprint service, which we’ll cover in detail shortly.
🔗 Building commerce agents with Claude (Anthropic)
Google hits back at SERP scrapers (and breaks rank tracking tools)
As if SEO reporting wasn't hard enough already, Google has started sending organic search clicks through a redirect at google.com/goto before they reach the destination page.
The pattern was first spotted in tests back in June and July, and by 26 August a Google spokesperson confirmed to Search Engine Land that the company is "regularly [taking] steps to protect our services and users". By the end of August it looked close to a full rollout.
Google hasn't published documentation, a timetable, or any detail on what the redirect is actually protecting against, though the most reasonable explanation is that it makes life harder for scraping tools and rank trackers that read search results programmatically, including at least one company Google is currently suing.
If you're a regular user of rank tracking tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, expect some disruption. Some tools have already shipped fixes, while others are still catching up, and either way gaps in data will be quite likely.
We rely on DataForSEO for a lot of our own internal tooling, and they've been quick with a fix here, they say they're now resolving 99.99% of affected URLs (though that's their own figure rather than one we've verified independently).
🔗 Google confirms deploying goto URL redirects to search results links (Search Engine Land)
Google switches off the Content API for Shopping
The Content API for Shopping hit its sunset date on 18 August, and since 1 September, Google's own documentation confirms that requests without an approved extension have started intermittently failing with an HTTP 410 Gone error. The full shutdown isn't until early 2027, but expect these failures to get more frequent between now and then.
If you manage Merchant Center through an ecommerce platform, you can relax, your platform partner handles the migration. The stores that need to check are the ones running a custom integration, an in-house script, a legacy agency-built tool, or a third-party app that hasn't moved to the Merchant API.
If your product feed connects to Merchant Center through anything other than a managed platform integration, it’s worth confirming right now whether it's moved to the Merchant API. Google has an extension request form for anyone still mid-migration, though this really should be a last resort.
🔗 Content API for Shopping: deprecation and sunset (Google for Developers)
Google tests giving Performance Max advertisers channel-level control
Google is testing, in alpha, a "Channels" setting inside Performance Max that lets advertisers prioritise individual channels, such as Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, instead of leaving allocation entirely to the algorithm.
In my view, this is a positive step. PMax has always given very little visibility into which channel is actually working. However, it's not yet clear whether we'll see any actual performance data by channel, which would be the most useful thing.
🔗 Google tests channel prioritization controls for Performance Max (Search Engine Land)
Matrixify finally catches up with Shopify's new Collections model
When Shopify replaced manual and smart collections with a single multi-source model, Matrixify's exports and imports broke with no error message. The bug ran for weeks before anyone traced it to the API version change.
Matrixify has now shipped the fix - a new unified Collections sheet built for the multi-source model directly, supporting include and exclude conditions, variant targeting, manual picks, and publishing to all sales channels in one place.
The old Smart Collections and Custom Collections sheets still work for now but are marked deprecated and won't be maintained. If you manage a large catalogue through Matrixify, you’ll need to move onto the new Collections sheet.
Given that a large amount of our work focuses on optimising collections, this is a big relief.
🔗 Matrixify Collections documentation (updated 4 September 2026)
Introducing our new product data sprint service
Here's something a bit different than usual. We talk a lot here about the impact product data has on every channel, and in our own experience, fixing it usually increases revenue by around 20% without any increase in ad spend.
However, signing up to an ongoing relationship with an agency like ours is a real commitment, and not every brand needs one. For smaller brands, a short, focused sprint on product data can fix most - or all - of what's actually wrong, without committing to anything bigger. For bigger brands, the challenge is often internal buy-in rather than the work itself, and a short piece of work that demonstrates the value is a much better approach.
With that in mind, we've built a new service: the product data sprint. Alongside the core product data work, it includes the standard groundwork we do on every project regardless of size, tracking, taxonomy, and the custom Shopify modules and fixes we've refined over years of doing work this over and over.
We've had good feedback and solid interest in it so far. If you manage a large-catalogue store and want to see what that looks like in practice, drop me a message or find me at blinkseo.co.uk.
🔗 Find out more about the Product data sprint
Jobs
Hiring:
FiftyFlowers are looking for a Head of Ecommerce to run their Shopify Plus platform and roadmap alongside their commercial team, and is a good fit for anyone with large-catalogue Shopify Plus experience.
Looking for work:
Imogen Crawford is an ecommerce consultant taking on new projects from 1 October, including audits, 90-day plans, full ecommerce strategy work and a quarterly coaching retainer. She's easing back in after maternity leave and has capacity for new clients now. I know Imogen personally and can very much vouch for her work. If you'd like a direct introduction, please feel free to drop me a message.
Partner shout out: Team Sterka
This is more one for the agencies in our network. We went through Team Sterka's programme last year, and I've consistently said that it's been one of the best things we've done as a business.
Team Sterka run People Skills as a Service, and as agency work becomes more technical and complex, the need for better client skills is only going to become greater.
Trenton Moss is running a Zoom taster session on the 8th/9th of October for anyone interested in seeing what the programme is like. Feel free to drop him a message for more details.
🔗 Team Sterka
As ever, thanks for reading. If you found this useful, forwarding it on to someone else who runs or works on a large-catalogue Shopify store helps us more than just about anything.
See you next week.
Sam
Who am I and what does Blink do?
I'm Sam Wright, Managing Director and co-founder of Blink SEO. We're a search marketing agency that works exclusively with large-catalogue Shopify stores - the kind where the challenge isn't just visibility, but helping customers find the right product in the first place.
We specialise in SEO and PPC for merchants managing hundreds or thousands of products. Most of our work starts with taxonomy: how a store is structured and categorised, and what that means for organic performance, paid efficiency, and on-site discovery.
If you found this useful and aren't already subscribed, you can sign up at blinkseo.co.uk/blinktank.
If you run a large-catalogue Shopify store and want to talk about organic or paid performance, reply to this email or find me at blinkseo.co.uk.