Context Engineering
The practice of deliberately structuring what information an AI model has access to at query time, the discipline that determines whether an LLM answers accurately or guesses.
What it means
Context engineering is broader than prompt writing, it covers what data gets retrieved, how it's formatted, and what gets included or excluded before a model generates an answer. For commerce, this means structuring product data, schema, and catalog information so that when an AI system retrieves context to answer a shopping query, it retrieves accurate, complete, well-formatted facts rather than fragments that lead to a vague or wrong answer.
Why it matters for Shopify
Shopify merchants who structure their product data cleanly are effectively doing context engineering on behalf of every AI system that might retrieve it, improving the odds of an accurate answer without controlling the AI model itself.