Yes, but only indirectly. Your Shopify theme can affect AI search visibility through things like page speed, HTML structure, crawlability, mobile rendering, and how cleanly product and collection information is exposed. It does not act like a standalone “AI search ranking factor,” and changing themes alone will not make a weak store suddenly surface in AI answers. The confusion starts because a theme controls a lot of the presentation layer of a Shopify store. Shopify’s documentation says a theme controls the organization, features, and style of the online store, while Google says AI features in Search still rely on normal crawling and indexing controls through Googlebot. So the useful question is not “does a theme rank me in AI search,” but “does my theme make the store easier or harder for systems to crawl, understand, and reuse?”