Does Shopify Sidekick Remember Between Sessions? What Actually Persists

Yes. Since the Winter '26 update, Shopify Sidekick remembers you between sessions: it recalls past conversations for about three months, keeps preferences you state explicitly, learns how you like information presented, and can refer to your recent activity in the admin from about the last 12 hours. New conversations pick up that context automatically, at your user level, so you can resume work without re-explaining it.

What does Sidekick actually remember?

Shopify's memory page describes four kinds of information:

1. Explicit preferences. Details you tell Sidekick about yourself, your store, or how you want work done. It keeps them for future conversations.
2. Past conversations. Sidekick can recall earlier chats, so a topic from last week can be referenced naturally in a new conversation.
3. Implicit preferences. As you work with it, Sidekick adapts to your communication style and how you prefer to receive information.
4. Recent activity. Sidekick can refer to what you were recently doing in the admin, for example a product you just edited, so you do not have to explain where you were working.

Your chat history is also stored across browser sessions, and you can open the list of previous conversations and continue from it.

How long does Sidekick remember?

Two clocks matter, and they are different:

• Past conversations: about three months. After that window, older discussions fall out of what Sidekick can recall. It is a rolling window, not a permanent record of everything you ever discussed.
• Recent admin activity: about 12 hours. The "what you were just doing" context is short-lived by design. Yesterday's editing session is not part of it.

So Sidekick memory is real, and it is genuinely useful for continuity inside the admin. It is also time-boxed. A seasonal decision you talked through four months ago is outside the window, and a store operator who treats Sidekick as the permanent record of the business will eventually ask it about something it no longer holds.

What does Sidekick not remember?

Three boundaries catch operators out:

Theme editor work is excluded. Conversations with Sidekick inside the theme editor are not added to Sidekick's memory. If you want that work carried into a normal Sidekick chat, Shopify says to include the details again in your new question.

Memory is per user, not per store team. Shopify's changelog states that all memory is at a user level. What you taught your Sidekick lives with your login. A teammate, a contractor, or an agency staffer opening Sidekick on the same store starts with their own memory, not yours. For agencies running several client stores, that means the context is fragmented by person as well as by store.

It only lives inside Shopify. Sidekick's memory serves Sidekick. It does not become memory for the rest of your automation stack: the Shopify Flow workflows Sidekick can help you build, the n8n or Make scenarios syncing orders and inventory, or the scheduled agents preparing your weekly report. Those runs still start with whatever state you wired into them, and nothing Sidekick learned in a chat reaches them.

What about the automations around your store?

This is the gap that matters once a store grows past manual work. A typical operator stack looks like this: Sidekick for questions and admin tasks, Flow for in-store rules, and one or more scheduled automations outside Shopify for reporting, stock alerts, supplier follow-up, and marketing handoffs.

Each of those scheduled runs is stateless unless you gave it somewhere to keep state. Flow remembers the data in your store, because that data is its input. It does not remember what last Tuesday's run decided, which supplier was already chased, or why a product was flagged. Operators usually patch this with the same three workarounds:

1. Fields and tags. Save outcomes into metafields, tags, or notes at the end of a run and read them back at the start of the next one. Works for a handful of values you designed in advance.
2. A spreadsheet or CRM as run memory. The run writes a row, the next run reads the sheet. Inspectable, and it becomes the thing nobody wants to maintain.
3. A shared memory layer. One store that sits outside every platform: each run reads what is relevant before it acts and saves what it learned when it finishes, and the same store is reachable from every tool you run.

Where a shared memory layer fits

Vilix AI is built for that third pattern. It is a cloud-hosted memory layer your tools and agents reach over MCP, so there is no database to run and no schema to design. The n8n scenario that syncs your orders, the scheduled agent that drafts your Monday report, and the AI assistant you plan in all read and write the same memory, instead of each one keeping a private notebook. It stores full conversation history, not just extracted facts, so a later run can revisit why a decision was made. Retrieval combines semantic search with keyword matching, so concepts are found by meaning while exact strings like order IDs and SKUs are matched literally. Correct a fact once and the newest version is what every tool sees. Your data stays yours: export everything in a portable format anytime, or delete individual memories or wipe the account instantly. The free plan is free forever, and the 7-day Pro trial needs no credit card.

Sidekick does not need replacing. It needs company: its three-month, per-user memory handles your chats inside the admin, and a shared layer handles everything your automations learn outside it.

How do you get the most out of Sidekick memory today?

1. State preferences explicitly. Tell Sidekick the formats, thresholds, and conventions you want reused. Explicit preferences are the part of its memory designed to persist.
2. Resume from the conversation list. Open a previous conversation instead of starting a parallel one, so the thread of work stays in one place.
3. Re-brief after the theme editor. Anything decided there is outside Sidekick memory, so restate it in a normal chat if it matters later.
4. Turn memory off for sensitive conversations. Shopify lets you exclude a conversation from using stored information and recent activity.
5. Keep the permanent record outside any one assistant. Decisions that must outlive three months, be shared across your team, or drive scheduled automations belong in a memory your whole stack can read, not only in a chat window.

FAQ

Does Shopify Sidekick remember between sessions? Yes. Sidekick recalls past conversations, explicit preferences, implicit style preferences, and recent admin activity across sessions. Past conversations are remembered for about three months, and recent activity covers about the last 12 hours.

Is Sidekick memory shared with my team? No. Shopify states that memory is at a user level. Each staff member's Sidekick builds its own memory from their own conversations.

Does Sidekick remember theme editor conversations? No. Shopify states that conversations with Sidekick in the theme editor are not added to Sidekick's memory. Include the relevant details again when you continue the work in Sidekick chat.

Can Sidekick memory help my scheduled automations remember their last run? No. Sidekick memory lives inside Sidekick. Flow workflows and external automations in tools like n8n or Make need their own state or a shared memory layer to remember what previous runs did.