In April 2025, OpenAI expanded ChatGPT’s search capabilities to position the platform as a discovery tool for online shopping. Available to all ChatGPT users, the update includes personalised product recommendations that come with images, reviews, and direct purchase links.
The update comes amid intensifying competition in the search space. OpenAI positions ChatGPT Search as a user-focused alternative to traditional search engines, which often rely heavily on advertising.
How ChatGPT Search’s Shopping Feature Works
Upon receiving a user query, ChatGPT will crawl the Internet to return information. Importantly, the products recommended are not advertisements and are instead selected based on several factors:
- User intent derived from the query and user preferences stores in its memory (learn more about ChatGPT memory here)
- Metadata from third-party providers including price, product description, and customer ratings
- OpenAI’s internal safety standards, which determine what results are suitable to display.
Example:
Impact on Retailers and Merchants
Any merchant can appear in ChatGPT’s results, provided their websites allow OpenAI’s crawler to index content. OpenAI is exploring direct product feed submissions, which would give retailers more control over how their products are listed and updated.
As of July 2025, the order in which products are displayed in ChatGPT’s outputs is based entirely on how products are ranked by third-party providers that ChatGPT gets metadata from. ChatGPT itself does not re-rank them.
For businesses, this presents a new distribution channel similar to traditional search engines. Retailers may need to adjust product metadata to ensure discoverability in AI-driven search.
Advertising and Search Engine Optimisation Considerations
As AI search becomes increasingly popular, with 83% of users preferring it over traditional search engines (Innovating with AI), advertisers will have to consider how to make their products and services discoverable on AI platforms.
While many strategies may resemble traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), there are important differences. AI search optimisation will need to account for conversational queries and the possibility of future developments in AI ranking systems, which prioritise context and intent rather than simple keyword matches.
(Learn more about how ChatGPT is changing search here)
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