Sidekick is the assistant built into your Shopify admin. Short Links is connected to it, so you can ask about your links in plain words from any page — no need to open the app, and nothing to switch on. The connection ships with the app and works as soon as it is installed.
Look for the assistant icon in your admin and ask for what you want. Settings > Sidekick in the app lists example phrasings if you want somewhere to start.
What you can ask
Find links - “Which of my short links have expired?”, “Find the link I made for the summer sale”, “Show me links pointing at my sale collection”. Sidekick returns each link’s name, short URL, destination, total clicks and status, and can open any of them in the app.
Check performance - “How did my short links perform last week?”, “Which link got the most clicks this month?”, “Where is my link traffic coming from?”. Sidekick reports total clicks for the period you name, how many links were clicked, the busiest ones and the top referring sites.
Start a new link - “Create a short link for my summer sale collection”. Sidekick opens the new-link form in a window, with the destination and name already filled in.
Get a link’s QR code - “Show me the QR code for my summer sale link”, “Download that one as an SVG”. Sidekick opens that link’s page with its QR code on screen and can save it for you as a PNG or an SVG.
Creating a link still ends with you
When you ask Sidekick to create a link, it opens the form pre-filled — it does not create the link itself. Nothing is shortened, and the short URL does not work, until you review the form and press Generate Short Link. This is deliberate: a short link is something customers see, and the app never publishes one on your behalf.
While the form is open you can keep talking to Sidekick instead of typing. “Make the short key /spring”, “call it Instagram bio instead”, “point it at the sale collection” — it edits the fields in front of you, and saving is still your move.
After you press Generate, the window shows the new short URL and its QR code, with a Done button underneath. Pressing Done is what hands the link back to Sidekick, so it can tell you the short URL in the conversation and offer to do something else with it — like fetching its QR code. If you close the window instead, the link is still created; Sidekick simply never hears about it and will have to look it up.
Getting a QR code
Every short link has a QR code that encodes its short URL, so a scan goes through the same redirect and counts as a click. Ask Sidekick for a link’s code and it opens that link’s page with the code showing, then downloads it on request:
SVG - stays sharp at any size. Use it for print, packaging and posters.
PNG - an image file, best for slides, social posts and email.
The file downloads to your own device. Close the window when you are finished with it. An expired link still has a QR code and it still renders — but scanning it no longer redirects anywhere.
What Sidekick can see
Only this app’s own data: your short links and their click history. It has no view of your orders, products or customers through Short Links, so questions about those are better asked of Sidekick directly, which has its own access to your store.
Click analytics are part of the paid plans, the same as the Analytics page in the app. On the free plan Sidekick will tell you that click data needs an upgrade rather than reporting figures.
Things worth knowing
A link’s short key and destination cannot be changed after it is created. If you need a different destination, make a new link — Sidekick will say the same.
Custom short keys are a paid-plan feature. On a free plan that field is disabled on the form, so a key you ask Sidekick for is not applied and the link keeps its generated one.
Sidekick reads your links each time you ask, so answers reflect the app as it is at that moment.
Asking about “clicks last week” and a link’s “total clicks” are different numbers: the first covers the period you named, the second the link’s whole life.