Open your Shopify admin this week and it may greet you differently.
Instead of a blank dashboard waiting for you to go digging, Shopify’s assistant — Sidekick — now meets you with a short list of things it thinks you should look at. Low stock on a product that’s suddenly moving. A traffic bump you didn’t notice. A refund pattern worth a glance. That’s Sidekick Pulse, the piece of the Spring ‘26 Edition (shipped June 17) that turns your store’s own sales, traffic, and inventory data into “next best actions” on a redesigned home screen.
It’s free, it’s on every plan, and for most stores it’s already switched on. No upsell, no separate subscription.
Did it help, or not?
Here’s the honest read.
What it actually is: a triage layer. Pulse is good at the thing solo operators quietly skip — noticing. It surfaces the dip, the spike, the product trending up, and puts it in front of you before you’d have thought to check. If you’re running a store between a day job and everything else, having the admin point at what changed this week is a real, small win.
What it isn’t: an autopilot. Pulse recommends; you still decide and click. You’ll see claims floating around that Shopify’s AI now auto-pauses your losing Meta ads or predicts a stockout 14 days out from weather patterns — that’s mostly blog embellishment, and where it’s real it’s a different, early-access feature (Campaign Autopilot), not Pulse. Don’t switch off your own judgment because the home screen got smarter. Treat Pulse as a sharp assistant manager, not a replacement for reading your own numbers.
The trap isn’t that Pulse is bad. It’s that “the AI will tell me if something’s wrong” quietly becomes “I stopped looking.” A nudge only helps if you still know what good looks like.
One stat worth knowing
Shopify says Sidekick’s weekly active shops grew 4x year-over-year in Q1 2026. Real momentum — but it’s Shopify-reported and not independently audited, so read it as direction of travel, not gospel. Plenty of those shops opened it once. The number that matters is whether you action what it surfaces.
Your 20-minute move this week
Open your admin home and actually work the Pulse list once. Read every item it surfaces. For each one, either act on it or dismiss it — don’t let it sit. Then ask the only question that matters: was even one of these something I’d genuinely have missed?
If yes, Pulse is signal for your store — keep the habit. If it was all stuff you already knew, it’s noise, and you can close it and move on with a clear conscience. Twenty minutes either way, and you’ll know where it stands instead of guessing.
That’s the week. Reply and tell me what Pulse flagged for your store — I read every one.
— The AnvilHQ Team