How do shoppers use ChatGPT to find products, and how does a store get recommended?

How shoppers actually use ChatGPT to shop

Search engines trained people to type short keywords. In a chat, people write the way they'd talk to a shop assistant. They give a budget, a use, a constraint and a preference all at once, then refine: "cheaper", "only ones that ship to Portugal", "which one has the best reviews for sizing?"

According to OpenAI's guide to shopping with ChatGPT, when a question shows shopping intent, ChatGPT can show product options with images, details and links to stores. Shoppers can also:

• upload a photo and ask for similar items;
• compare products side by side on price, reviews and features;
• save products to a list in their ChatGPT Library;
• "try on" clothes and accessories with a generated image.

That changes what your store competes on. On a search results page you compete for a click on a blue link. In a chat, ChatGPT reads your product page for the shopper and decides if it fits the request. If the page doesn't say what the product is made of, who it's for or whether it's in stock, ChatGPT can't match it to a detailed question.

How does ChatGPT decide which products to show?

OpenAI's help centre says a product appears when ChatGPT judges it relevant to the shopper's intent, using their question and context, such as Memory or Custom instructions. To choose products, it considers:

1. Structured metadata from first-party and third-party providers, such as price and product description, plus other third-party content.
2. What the model already knows before it runs a new search.
3. OpenAI's safety standards and product policies.

The weight shifts with the question. OpenAI's own example: if a shopper sets a $30 budget, ChatGPT focuses more on price; if they don't mention price, it looks at other things.

Two details matter for store owners:

• ChatGPT may rewrite your product titles and descriptions into simpler versions, because merchants describe the same product in different ways. A messy title ("NEW!! Jacket Blk M SALE 2026") gives it less to work with.
• Labels and review summaries come from the wider web. Labels such as "Budget-friendly" or "Most popular" are generated by ChatGPT, and review summaries are based on reviews from public websites. What customers say about you elsewhere now feeds straight into the recommendation.

How does it pick which store to send the shopper to?

The same product is often sold by several shops, so this is the question store owners care about most.

OpenAI says that when a shopper selects a product, ChatGPT may show a list of merchants that offer it. Merchants are ranked on factors like availability, price, quality, and whether they are the maker or primary seller of the item. OpenAI also says it expects to personalise these rankings more to each shopper over time.

In practice that means:

• If you make the product, say so clearly. Being the brand or main seller is a stated ranking factor.
• Out-of-stock pages hurt. Availability is the first factor on the list.
• Your price has to be right everywhere. OpenAI notes that price and shipping changes can take time to show up, and it tries to highlight the lowest price it knows about.

Do you need a product feed to appear in ChatGPT?

Not strictly. On its page for merchants, OpenAI answers this directly: you don't need a product feed if ChatGPT already crawls your site, "but feeds give you greater control over how your products appear."

How your products get in depends on how you sell:

A few points from the official pages:

• Shopify: Shopify's help page on selling on ChatGPT says the channel is on by default for eligible stores. Customers buy through your normal online store checkout, and there are no extra fees beyond standard payment processing. It also says legal disclosures should sit in the first 6,000 characters of your product descriptions.
• Everyone else: OpenAI's crawler documentation says OAI-SearchBot is the bot that surfaces websites in ChatGPT search. Sites that block it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. You can still block GPTBot, the training crawler, and allow OAI-SearchBot. We explain how in How to allow AI search bots but block AI training in robots.txt.
• Direct feeds: OpenAI's product feed getting-started guide suggests a full feed once a day plus updates through the day for price and stock.
• No fees: OpenAI says there are no fees on purchases that start in ChatGPT.

If you sell mostly in Europe, keep one thing in mind. OpenAI says shopping is live in the US for now and will expand to more regions over time. The work below still pays off, because the same product data is what Google and other AI assistants read.

What about Google AI Mode and AI Overviews?

Shoppers don't only ask ChatGPT. In our news post on AI Overviews appearing on 88% of commercial searches, we covered a Semrush study that tracked 400 US commercial keywords. It found AI Overviews on 96% of "best X for Y" searches.

Google's guidance on AI features and your website says there are no extra requirements or special optimisations for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Its list of good practice does include one point aimed at stores: keep your Merchant Center and Business Profile information up to date. Google's merchant listing structured data guide explains how Product markup makes pages eligible for shopping results on Google Search.

The same basics work across assistants.

What a store owner can do this week

1. Ask ChatGPT about your own category. Type the questions your customers ask ("best vegan leather bag for work under €200"). Note which stores come up and what the answers say about you, if anything.
2. Check you're not blocking the search bots. Look at your robots.txt or ask whoever manages your site. Allowing OAI-SearchBot is what lets ChatGPT show your pages. Our free scan checks this for you.
3. Rewrite your top 10 product titles and descriptions. Say plainly what the product is, what it's made of, who it's for, sizes, and what makes it different. Write for the question a shopper would ask, not for a keyword list.
4. Make price, stock and shipping obvious on the page. Show them as text, not only in images or pop-ups. If you're the maker, say so on the page.
5. Keep your feeds in sync. If you use Shopify, check the ChatGPT channel hasn't been switched off. If you have Google Merchant Center, check prices and stock match your site.
6. Get honest reviews on and off your site. ChatGPT's review summaries come from public websites. Ask happy customers to leave reviews where people look for them.
7. Publish clear policies. Returns, shipping times and countries served answer the follow-up questions shoppers ask before they buy.

What you can't control

You can't pay for placement in these product results; OpenAI says they're independent of ads. OpenAI also says not every relevant product will be shown, and results depend on each shopper's question and context. Nobody can promise you a top spot in ChatGPT. What you can do is remove the reasons it would skip you: pages it can't read, missing details, wrong prices and no reviews.

Next step

Want to know if ChatGPT and other AI assistants can read your store? Run the free Web2Agents scan. It checks your homepage across 6 AI-readiness areas, including whether AI search bots can reach your site, and emails you a score with what to fix first.