The "comparison against industry peer averages" feature will stop receiving new data and will eventually be removed entirely. The alternatives are Metric Targets (setting goal values) and Sidekick (personalized suggestions).
"Benchmark Comparisons" in Shopify Analytics. The view that compares your store's metrics against industry peer averages will disappear.
① Metric Targets(set your own goal values and track them in reports)
② Sidekick(ask the AI for personalized advice on your store's performance)
A feature that lets you set your own KPI target values within reports and visualize how close you are to hitting them."Are we above average?" gives way to "How are we doing against our own goals?" — that becomes how you measure.
Shopify's AI assistant. It answers natural-language questions like "How should I improve this metric for my store?" by drawing on your own store's data.Context-aware suggestions instead of quantitative comparison— that's the role it fills.
| Item | Before(~5/19) | After(5/19~) |
|---|---|---|
| Comparison against peer averages | Yes Benchmark Comparisons | No Feature removed entirely |
| Benchmark for measuring performance | An outward-looking metric: the "industry average" | Centered on "your own goals" via Metric Targets |
| Getting improvement insights | Look at the gap from the average and interpret it yourself | Ask Sidekick directly → personalized answers |
| Citing in report materials | You could show "+XX% vs. industry average" | Can't cite it anymore. Replaced by your own goal-attainment rate or AI comments |
| New data updates | Still updated | Stopped(since before 5/19) |
Rather than "Deprecated," it's a Removed —that's how it's treated. As of 5/19 it disappears from the UI. Operate on the assumption that there's no interim workaround via a feature toggle.
There's a window where "no new data flows in, but the display remains." If you have a setup that automatically fetches Benchmark values,the risk of silently continuing to pull stale valuesexists.
Metric Targets compares against your own KPIs, not against other companies. Because the decision-making logic moves from "beating the average" to "hitting the target," you need a shift in mindset for how you design your reporting.
The original post makes no mention of how Benchmark fields are handled in existing Admin API / Analytics integrations. If you have automated integrations in place,advance verification is essential.
With Metric Targets alone, you tend to end up at "we hit the target, but we don't know what to do next."A two-tier setup—quantitative targets via Metric Targets, individual actions filled in by Sidekick—is the natural sweet spot. The original post, too, presents these two side by side.