You are in Shopify admin, mid-task, and you want to know whether your collection pages have descriptions. Normally that means opening Seokai, running an audit, reading the result. With the Sidekick extension you can ask Sidekick instead and get Seokai's answer in the chat.
What the extension adds
Seokai ships two tools into Shopify Sidekick, Shopify's own admin assistant. Sidekick decides when a question is about your store's SEO and calls the relevant tool. You do not invoke Seokai by name, though you can.
Both tools are read-only. They report, they never change anything.
The two tools
1. Store-wide audit summary
Returns Seokai's SEO health check across your whole store: products, collections, pages, and blog articles. This is the same audit that runs inside the app, surfaced as a conversational answer instead of a dashboard.
Use it when you want the overall picture: how the store is doing, which areas are weakest, whether anything got worse.
2. What needs work
Returns the list of entities missing metadata. Not a percentage, actual items. This is the answer Sidekick cannot produce on its own, because it requires a pass over the entire catalog rather than a look at the record in front of it.
Use it when you want a work queue: what to fix, in what order, starting where.
Questions you can ask
Phrase them normally. A few that map cleanly to the tools:
- "How is my store's SEO doing?"
- "Which products are missing meta descriptions?"
- "Do my collections have SEO descriptions?"
- "What SEO issues should I fix first?"
- "Are any of my blog articles missing metadata?"
- "Give me an SEO health summary for the store."
Questions about a single item that Sidekick can already answer from the product record will usually be handled by Sidekick directly. The Seokai tools earn their place on the store-wide questions.
Results link back to admin
Every item in a result links to the relevant page in Shopify admin. So the flow is:
- Ask Sidekick.
- Read the list.
- Click through to the product, collection, page, or article.
- Fix it, either in admin or in Seokai.
You are never left with a finding you have to go hunt down manually.
What this does not do
You cannot run an optimization through Seokai from Sidekick. There is no "optimize this" action. The integration reads and reports; the writing happens in the Seokai app or in Shopify admin.
This is a deliberate limit, not a gap waiting on a release. The action was built and then parked, because Sidekick overrides app deep links for Shopify-native resources. Ask Sidekick to optimize a page and it writes its own SEO fields rather than handing the request to Seokai. Rather than ship a button that appears to call Seokai and quietly does something else, we left it out.
If Shopify's handling of app deep links changes, this is the first thing to come back.
Sidekick and Seokai do different jobs
Worth being clear on the split, because it determines which one you should reach for:
- Sidekick is strong on the item in front of you. It reads the product record, drafts copy, stages the change, waits for your approval. One thing at a time, done well.
- Seokai holds the store-wide state. It knows what a full pass over your catalog found, which is a counting and storage problem rather than a conversational one.
The extension puts the second thing inside the first. You ask in the place you were already working, and the answer comes from a real audit rather than a guess.
Where to go next
- Run a full audit inside the Seokai app when you want to act on the results in bulk rather than one at a time.
- Read AI visibility and agent readiness for what machine readers look at beyond metadata.
- Read how AI search engines choose if you want the reasoning behind what the audit flags.
One practical habit: ask the "what needs work" question at the start of a session rather than the end. It turns a vague intention to improve SEO into a list with a finite bottom.
