WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
Increasingly AI is your search engine and your personal shopping assistant, and that changes everything.
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As companies from Amazon to Visa chase the new Agentic Commerce trend OpenAI has introduced new shopping features to ChatGPT to rival Google and enhance the chatbot’s web search capabilities to provide users with personalized product recommendations, images, reviews, and direct purchase links. The enhancement is now available to all users, regardless of whether they are using the free, Plus, or Pro versions of ChatGPT.
The shopping upgrade is integrated into OpenAI’s latest AI model, GPT-4o, and comes as ChatGPT’s search function has exploded in popularity, according to the company. Users conducted more than a billion web searches through ChatGPT in the past week alone, making search one of the platform’s most utilized features.
With the update, users can ask ChatGPT for advice on various shopping categories, including fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics. When a user poses a specific question – such as asking for the “best espresso machine under $200” – ChatGPT responds with a curated list of options, accompanied by photos, prices, and links to various retailers. Clicking on a product takes the user to the merchant’s website to complete the purchase, as transactions cannot be finalized within ChatGPT itself – although the company’s new tie up with Visa will soon mean you can do everything without ever having to leave OpenAI’s walled garden.
We're excited to announce we’ve launched several improvements to ChatGPT search, and today we’re starting to roll out a better shopping experience.
Search has become one of our most popular & fastest growing features, with over 1 billion web searches just in the past week
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) April 28, 2025
See it in action
OpenAI wants you to notice the difference between the current state of ChatGPT’s shopping experience from competitors like Google Shopping.
“They are not ads,” said Adam Fry, product lead for ChatGPT search at OpenAI. “They are not sponsored.”
OpenAI says it does not accept payment for product placement and does not earn commissions from purchases made through ChatGPT. Instead, product recommendations are selected based on structured metadata, including pricing, descriptions, and reviews “sourced across the web.”
We should add that, in practice, that means OpenAI bots will have crawled the web for reviews and aggregated information from review websites (like TechSpot, for example), sometimes without express permission, and offer those recommendations as their own.
OpenAI says product suggestions are personalized, drawing on ChatGPT’s memory of a user’s preferences and incorporating feedback from previous conversations. Fry explained that the AI is designed to understand not just keywords, but also the context of reviews and user preferences, making the experience more conversational and tailored.
“It’s trying to understand how people are reviewing this, how people are talking about this, what the pros and cons are,” Fry said. If a user expresses a preference for certain brands or styles, ChatGPT will remember and factor those into future recommendations, he said.
Reviews featured in ChatGPT’s shopping results come from a blend of editorial sources, such as buying guides from publishers, and user-generated content from forums like Reddit. Users can also instruct ChatGPT to prioritize specific types of reviews when compiling recommendations. For instance, ChatGPT can adjust its suggestions if a user wants to see only professional reviews or prefers feedback from everyday consumers.
Launching these features is part of OpenAI’s strategy to challenge Google’s dominance in online search and shopping. Unlike Google, where paid placements and affiliate links influence which products are shown to users, ChatGPT’s recommendations are free from commercial influence, for now.
Despite the potential for affiliate revenue, Fry said OpenAI’s immediate priority is providing high-quality, unbiased recommendations.
“We are going to be experimenting with a whole bunch of different ways that this can work,” Fry said, noting that the company may explore different affiliate models in the future but is focused on user experience for now.
This shopping update follows recent enhancements to ChatGPT’s search capabilities, including trending search suggestions and autocomplete features to make finding information more intuitive. OpenAI’s move comes amid a broader industry trend, with competitors like Google and Perplexity also integrating AI-powered shopping tools into their platforms.
