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Cloudflare in front of Shopify. Your Shopify developer has probably said, don't do this. And this screen is why.
Cloudflare fixed that in 2021 with their Orange to Orange protocol.
We wrote a whole guide on how to set this up that you can find on our website, because we kept hearing the same thing. You shouldn't do it, it's not possible. What are you thinking? And we just wanted to dispel some of the misconceptions and update everyone for how you can do it safely today.
Why do this at all? Well, there's two things that having an edge service shows you that Shopify out of the box doesn't.
First, it's around bots. Most bots politely identify themselves. Those go through the Shopify validation system just fine. The problem arises when you have bad actors that don't behave like the good ones.
And in your Shopify data, they can start showing up like someone who's on their phone or on their laptop, and they get counted as real people. And then your sessions start to inflate, and that can have an impact on other ecommerce metrics like conversion rate.
So there's a simple tell with all of this behavior. A real customer looks at a handful of pages and then they leave. But when a single IP address loads 500 pages in one session, it's probably not a real shopper, it's a machine.
Your Shopify reports will tell you how many sessions you've had, but never the address that they came from. And that piece of data is the thing that gives these bots away.
The second scenario is with AI traffic. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Perplexity, Google-Extended. All of these are fetching content from your site. And that's not something you're going to see in a Shopify analytics report or a Google Analytics report, at least not completely.
Some of these signals are there, but they're fuzzy. They're under-reported, often by five times the true amount. And the number in those dashboards is just not something you can trust.
But when you bring an edge service on like Cloudflare on top of Shopify, you get to see the raw log files and the events, and you can parse them out yourself. Which AI crawlers hit your store, how often, the products and collections that they took, and also which of them send real customers back as a referral.
So when you're looking at that Shopify domain setting message, unsupported doesn't mean broken. It just means Shopify won't debug a layer they won't control.
And if you have a Shopify store and you want to test this implementation, you absolutely can. Just test it thoroughly, point it to your live domain and put a real order through, and test your apps, do extensive tests with your development team and make sure that nothing is broken, and you're good to go.
Back to you, Carl, to tell them how working with WISLR can help set this up. Carl? This video brought to you by WISLR.ai, for better revenue attribution with your AI channel analytics.