---
title: "Shopify Changes How It Counts Sessions, Moving Conversion Rates"
description: "Shopify Analytics changed how it counts sessions from 21 September 2026, so conversion rate can move with no change in orders or sales."
tldr: "Shopify changed how its Analytics counts sessions between 21 and 23 September 2026: sessions no longer end at midnight UTC, some visits without a pageview now count, and identified bots are filtered out by default. Orders, sales and customer counts are unaffected, but sessions and conversion rate can move with no change in real traffic. Older data is not reprocessed, so compare periods across the update on orders and sales."
publishDate: 2026-09-25
author: "Liam Hayward"
---
Shopify changed how Shopify Analytics counts sessions in a rollout that ran from 21 to 23 September 2026. Orders, sales and customer counts are unaffected, but sessions, and every rate built on them, can move with no change in real traffic.

## What changed in how Shopify counts sessions?

- **Sessions no longer end at midnight UTC.** A session now ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, so a visit that runs past midnight counts once instead of twice.
- **Some visits with no pageview now count.** Shopify's example is a customer going straight to checkout from a cart link.
- **Identified bots are filtered out by default.** Session reports now apply the Human or bot session filter, which has been optional since October 2025.

The first and third changes push the session count down and the second pushes it up, so the net effect differs by store. Shopify has not published how far a typical store's numbers moved. Conversion rate, add-to-cart rate, reached checkout rate and bounce rate all move with the session count. As Shopify puts it: "A higher or lower conversion rate after this update isn't automatically good or bad."

## Why Shopify session comparisons no longer line up

- **Old data is not recounted.** Shopify says historical data "isn't deleted or reprocessed by this update", so sessions before 21 September stay counted under the old rules. A before-and-after or year-on-year comparison, Black Friday 2025 included, sets old-rule sessions against new-rule ones.
- **Bot labels only go back to 7 October 2025.** For earlier periods the bot filter removes nothing.
- **Some screens ignore the filter.** The Home page and Live View show sessions without the Human or bot filter and cannot be switched, so their figures may not match a filtered report.

## What to do with your Shopify reports

- Annotate 21 to 23 September 2026 wherever Shopify sessions or conversion rate appear, including the Acquisition and Marketing reports that break traffic down by source.
- Use post-update data as the new baseline for session metrics, as Shopify advises.
- Judge performance across the change on orders and sales.
- Set the Human or bot filter the same way on both periods when you compare them.
- Expect any gap between GA4 and Shopify sessions to shift on those dates: Shopify's counting changed and GA4's did not.

Hydrogen and custom headless stores have separate tracking-cookie steps on Shopify's help page, so check those if your store is not on a standard theme.

## Sources

- [Changes to sessions and conversion rate in Shopify Analytics, Shopify Help Center](https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/reports-and-analytics/discrepancies/session-measurement-update)
- [Shopify Analytics session measurement improvements, Shopify Changelog](https://changelog.shopify.com/posts/shopify-analytics-session-measurement-improvements)
- [Filter out bot traffic in your sessions related reports, Shopify Changelog](https://changelog.shopify.com/posts/filter-out-bot-traffic-in-your-sessions-related-reports)