Sidekick can now find your app without a tools file

On September 28, 2026, Shopify shipped a change with a title only an app developer could love: Sidekick can now invoke app intents without tools. Underneath it is something larger than a config tweak. A merchant asking Sidekick a question is now a place your app can be discovered, and the text that decides whether you show up is two fields long.

It applies to every store immediately. No API version to target, no developer preview to join, nothing to wait for.

First, the naming collision

Shopify's docs use the word intents for two different mechanisms that point in opposite directions. Nearly everyone reading about one ends up in the docs for the other, so it is worth thirty seconds to separate them.

What changed on September 28

An app intent is declared on an extension target, along with the route Shopify should open and, optionally, a tools file and an instructions file. Here is the shape, quoted from Shopify's own example:

1[[extensions]]2name = "Open email"3description = "Edit an email campaign"4handle = "open-email"5type = "admin_link"6 7[[extensions.targeting]]8target = "admin.app.intent.link"9url = "/edit/{id}"10tools = "./tools.json"11instructions = "./instructions.md"12 13[[extensions.targeting.intents]]14type = "application/email"15action = "edit"16schema = "./email-schema.json"

Until this change, the tools line was load-bearing in a way nothing said out loud: no tools, or an empty tools.json, and the intent was never registered with Sidekick. An extension could declare exactly what it handled and still be passed over. That is now gone. The intent block alone makes you eligible.

Tools did not become useless, they became optional and they changed job. They still execute while the intent's destination page is open, so they are how Sidekick does something once it has arrived in your app rather than how it decides to come at all.

The two fields that decide whether you get matched

Eligibility is not visibility. Once you are eligible, whether Sidekick actually surfaces you for a given merchant question comes down to text you wrote, and there is not much of it.

1[sidekick]2extensions_summary = "Search and analyze product reviews, create review request campaigns"

That summary is capped at 256 tokens, and an app can register at most five intents. Both limits push the same way: this is not a place to describe your product, it is a place to name the concrete jobs a merchant might ask about. "Marketing automation platform" matches nothing a person actually types. "Create and schedule email campaigns, check campaign open rates" matches a question.

The same applies one level down. Each extension's description should name the domain it covers and the tasks it supports, not restate your app's tagline. And the optional instructions.md is where you tell Sidekick how to behave once it is inside your extension, which is the closest thing the platform currently offers to a system prompt you control.

Why this is a distribution change, not a feature

For a decade, being found inside the admin meant one thing: your App Store listing. A merchant went looking, searched a category, read a listing, installed. Everything about how apps are named and described was shaped by that one funnel.

A merchant asking Sidekick "how do I follow up with people who left a review" is a different funnel with different mechanics. There is no browsing, no comparison, no listing page. There is a question, and a matcher deciding which of the installed apps claims that job. Your extensions_summary is the thing being matched against, and it is about twenty words long.

There is a real limit worth being honest about: this surfaces apps a merchant has already installed. It is not a new acquisition channel, it is a retention and engagement one. The app that gets used is the app that does not get uninstalled at the next subscription review, and "Sidekick keeps sending me here" is a strong position to hold.

What to actually do this week

1. Check whether you have intents at all. Grep your extensions for extensions.targeting.intents. No matches means you are not in this conversation yet, and adding one intent is a small change.
2. Check for the [sidekick] block. Intents without extensions_summary is the most likely reason a correctly configured app never appears.
3. Rewrite the summary as tasks, not positioning. Read it back and ask whether a merchant would ever type those words into a chat box.
4. Deploy, then actually ask Sidekick. Configuration that is not exercised is configuration you are guessing about. Ask the three questions a real merchant would ask.
5. If you had tools only to be eligible, reconsider them. They are now for doing work on the destination page, which is a different design question from discovery.

Small change, and a good tell about direction. Shopify is steadily making the admin a place where a merchant describes an outcome instead of navigating to a screen. Apps that can be addressed by name in that world are in a different position from apps that can only be clicked.