How to get your products into ChatGPT Shopping

Quick answer

For your products to appear, you need to sell to US customers, where organic shopping results are currently available, and your category must be outside OpenAI's prohibited list. OAI-SearchBot must be able to crawl your product pages, and ChatGPT needs your data through Shopify Catalog, Etsy or a direct feed. Once those conditions are met, relevance, price, availability and quality determine where your products rank.

Key points

• Shoppers now usually click through to your site or app to pay, rather than buying inside ChatGPT.
• A direct feed gives you more control over prices, stock and variants than crawling alone.
• ChatGPT ads have no effect on organic product rankings.
• OpenAI's category rules can exclude entire product lines for health-food and drinks retailers.
• The UK has ChatGPT ads but not yet organic shopping results.
• Most of the work for retailers comes down to product data: complete attributes and identifiers, with prices that match the product page.

What is ChatGPT Shopping?

ChatGPT Shopping helps people discover products within a conversation. When a question signals buying intent, ChatGPT responds with product cards showing images, prices and links to merchants. It draws on public retail pages and merchant feeds sent through the Agentic Commerce Protocol. OpenAI says these product results aren't ads and aren't influenced by partnerships.

Each product page lists every merchant selling that item and marks the cheapest offer with a "Best price" label. Following the relaunch on 24 March 2026, shoppers on the Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans can also browse visually, upload a photo or compare products side by side.

Shopping research offers a more detailed way to explore a purchase. It asks clarifying questions, spends a few minutes reading product pages and then produces a personalised buyer's guide. Launched in November 2025, it draws on both merchant feeds and public retail sites.

What changed in ChatGPT Shopping in 2026?

OpenAI is moving away from standalone Instant Checkout, the in-chat buy button it launched with Etsy in September 2025. On 24 March 2026, it said the first version "did not offer the level of flexibility" it wanted. It then let merchants use their own checkout, so purchases now finish on the merchant's website or app.

Larger retailers can also build a ChatGPT app. Walmart uses this route to run its Sparky assistant inside ChatGPT. OpenAI describes apps as optional and best suited to larger merchants, alongside the options of feeds and crawling.

With checkout on your own site, you keep the payment, order data and customer relationship. Your store also remains the source of truth for price and stock. OpenAI isn't the merchant of record on any route.

The protocol behind OpenAI's feeds, ACP, is an open specification maintained by OpenAI and Stripe, and is still labelled beta. Google is developing a separate standard, the Universal Commerce Protocol, for its own AI shopping services.

How do products get into ChatGPT Shopping?

The route depends on your ecommerce platform. Of the four options below, only a direct product feed requires an application.

Shopify stores

For Shopify merchants, eligible products reach ChatGPT automatically through Shopify Catalog. Shopify's ChatGPT requirements say your store must sell to US customers, although the business itself can be based elsewhere. You also need to accept the Agentic Storefronts terms and complete your terms of service, privacy policy and refund policy.

B2B-only products are excluded. If you choose to opt out, the change takes up to seven days, and your products can still appear through crawling afterwards.

When a shopper chooses a Shopify product, ChatGPT sends them to your store to pay, either in an in-app browser or a new tab. There is no separate ChatGPT checkout setting to enable.

Every other platform: apply for a direct product feed

To apply, the OpenAI merchant application asks for your company, headquarters country, website, product categories, feed readiness and SKU count. The SKU bands range from under one million to over 100 million. Applicants join a waitlist, with onboarding currently limited to approved partners. OpenAI also accepts feeds through third-party providers such as Salesforce and Stripe.

OpenAI says it plans to introduce a self-serve merchant platform for data integration later in 2026.

You can still appear without a feed if ChatGPT already crawls your site. OpenAI confirms that a feed is optional, but submitting one gives you more control over how your products appear.

Let OAI-SearchBot crawl your product pages

OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's search crawler. Allowing it to read your product pages makes those pages eligible for ChatGPT's search answers; blocking it excludes them. GPTBot serves a different purpose: collecting training data. You can therefore block GPTBot while allowing OAI-SearchBot. According to OpenAI's crawler documentation, robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to apply.

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

# Optional: opt out of model training without leaving search
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Your CDN and bot-management rules need checking as well. A firewall can challenge or block OAI-SearchBot even when robots.txt allows it. OpenAI publishes the crawler's IP ranges so you can allowlist them. During the Tellis pilot with UK health-food retailer BuyWholeFoodsOnline, ChatGPT bot crawl activity rose 20× after the retailer fixed its crawlability.

What does the OpenAI product feed need?

The OpenAI product feed specification requires nine fields: item_id, title, description, url, brand, seller_name, image_url, availability and price. Keep titles within 150 characters and descriptions within 5,000. Each price pairs an amount with an ISO 4217 currency code. Rows with a missing or unrecognised availability value are rejected.

Fields that improve ranking

The required fields are only the starting point. OpenAI says recommended attributes, including rich media and reviews, improve ranking, relevance and trust. These optional fields are worth completing:

• Variants: group_id and variant_dict, to keep a product's sizes and colours together as one family.
• Identifiers: gtin and mpn.
• Attributes: product_category, material, color, size, dimensions and weight.
• Media: additional_image_urls for extra angles.
• Offer details: sale_price and shipping_price.
• Returns: accepts_returns, return_deadline_in_days and return_policy.
• Reviews: review_count and star_rating.

Formats, delivery and refresh

Push feed files to OpenAI by SFTP. Parquet is the preferred format, ideally with zstd compression; jsonl.gz, csv.gz and tsv.gz are also accepted.

• Keep each shard to roughly 500,000 items and under about 500MB.
• Send a full snapshot at least once a day. Use the API for real-time price and stock changes during the day, and for all promotions.
• If an item disappears from the file, OpenAI retains its last record for up to 14 days.
• The standard upload targets US shoppers; Canada and Mexico need separate market setup.

How it differs from a Google Merchant Center feed

If you already have a clean Google feed, much of the work is done. OpenAI accepts Google-compatible column names such as id, link and image_link once it confirms that format for your registered feed. The same quality of attributes that helps products in the Google Shopping Graph is what ChatGPT reads.

How does ChatGPT choose which products to show?

ChatGPT starts with the shopper's intent. It reads the query alongside context such as Memory and Custom Instructions, then selects products it considers relevant. On each product's page, OpenAI ranks merchants using four factors: availability, price, quality and whether they are the maker or primary seller. Its developer guidance also says richer feed attributes improve ranking.

The product card may use different wording from your feed. ChatGPT can rewrite titles and descriptions, and the model creates labels such as "Budget-friendly" and "Most popular". It still depends on the attributes you provide. OpenAI names price, reviews and ease of use among the factors it considers for a particular request.

Retailers that already perform well in Google Shopping may have a head start. A March 2026 analysis of ChatGPT shopping carousels examined about 5,000 carousels and 43,000 products. It found that 83% closely matched products in Google's top 40 organic Shopping results, compared with 11% for Bing.

That finding needs context. OpenAI hasn't disclosed which indexes it uses, and the study predates the March relaunch that introduced direct feeds. Treat the overlap as a useful signal, then check whether it holds for your own products.

Advertising is separate from organic ranking. During the beta, products uploaded through an Ads Manager feed appear only in ads. Buying those ads does not improve organic placement.

What to fix in your product data before ChatGPT reads it

The ranking factors OpenAI names lead back to product data you control. The following improvements each address a feed field or one of those factors:

• Include the attributes that help shoppers choose in your title: the brand, product type and one or two details they filter on, such as size, material or capacity.
• Complete the attribute fields as well as the description. Write descriptions in natural language that answers shoppers' questions. A material field that says merino is easier to match than the word "merino" buried in a paragraph.
• Group variants under one group_id so a request for "size 10 in black" leads to the right variant, rather than the parent product.
• Add a GTIN or MPN to every item that has one.
• Keep price and stock consistent across the feed, product page and checkout. Availability affects merchant ranking, and an in_stock flag on a sold-out item sends shoppers to a dead end.
• Include shipping and returns information in the feed as well as on your policy pages.
• Send review counts and star ratings. OpenAI lists reviews among the factors ChatGPT weighs.
• Use clear, publicly accessible images and include alternate angles. The image takes up most of a product card.
• Earn coverage beyond your own site. ChatGPT draws review summaries from public websites and uses metadata that includes third-party content. Retailer reviews, comparison articles and forum threads all contribute to its understanding of a product.
• Keep Product structured data on your pages for Google. For ChatGPT, remember that OpenAI hasn't said it reads schema.org markup; the structured route it documents is the feed.

In the catalogues we audit, supplier data is often thinnest in the first three areas: titles, attributes and variant grouping. Frequently, nobody owns the work of rewriting it. Tellis catalogue agents fill missing attributes and identifiers using supplier sheets, reviews and search queries, then stage every change for review. Our guide to thin product data and enrichment explains where that information comes from.

Common mistakes

• Allowing OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt while a CDN firewall still blocks it.
• Confusing GPTBot with OAI-SearchBot, and assuming a training-data block also keeps products out of shopping, or the reverse.
• Treating an Ads Manager product feed as a route into organic results.
• Applying for Instant Checkout while OpenAI is phasing it out.
• Sending an XML feed, which OpenAI's file upload does not accept.
• Exporting the feed weekly, less often than OpenAI recommends, and allowing prices to drift from the product page.
• Expecting products in a prohibited category to appear.

Is ChatGPT Shopping available in the UK?

Organic shopping results are not yet available in the UK. OpenAI says shopping is live for ChatGPT users in the US, with more regions to follow over time. UK-based retailers can still participate if they serve US customers. The feed application accepts any headquarters country, and Shopify stores qualify if they sell to customers in the US.

Advertising is already available. ChatGPT Ads reached the UK on 11 August 2026, and UK businesses can use self-serve Ads Manager. OpenAI hasn't published which countries support product-feed campaigns, so check your UK eligibility in Ads Manager before planning shopping ads.

For UK retailers, there is useful work to do now: get your product data ready for a feed. When organic shopping reaches the UK, merchants with complete attributes and synchronised prices will have the data ChatGPT needs to recommend them from day one.

How to measure traffic and sales from ChatGPT

ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links it sends to websites. As OpenAI's publisher FAQ explains, those referrals appear under that source in Google Analytics and most store analytics without extra setup. Break the traffic down by landing page to see which products bring shoppers to your site.

Referral traffic shows who clicked through, but it doesn't tell you whether your products appeared without a click. To assess that visibility, start with a free catalogue health scan. Then run the same set of shopping prompts each month, using three to five prompts for each of your 20 best sellers, and record which products and merchants appear.

Frequently asked questions