Heads up eCommerce store owners, you’ll want to pay attention to a big addition rolling out across ChatGPT: the addition of real-time shopping results. Yes, you read that right. ChatGPT isn’t just answering questions anymore—it’s helping people find, compare, and buy products directly from within the chat. And for online retailers, this is more than just cool technology—it could become a major driver of organic traffic and sales.
ChatGPT Integrates Shopping Results
OpenAI recently announced that it’s integrating shopping results directly into ChatGPT’s responses. That means when users ask something like “What are the best wireless headphones under $100?” or “What’s a good running shoe for flat feet?”, ChatGPT can now display a list of relevant products. These results include images, pricing, links to retailer websites, and even product reviews—creating a seamless experience that takes shoppers from question to purchase without ever leaving the chat.
This isn’t based on paid ads or sponsorships, either. Instead, OpenAI’s system crawls and indexes publicly available product data to deliver recommendations. And if your store’s products are well-optimized and properly structured, you could see them pop up in those results. No ad spend required.
So, what does this mean for your store?
First and foremost, it’s a new opportunity to reach potential customers at the very moment they’re looking to buy. With more consumers turning to AI tools to research products and make decisions, getting your listings in front of them through ChatGPT could give you a competitive edge—especially over sellers relying solely on traditional paid search ads.
But there’s a catch: your product pages have to be optimized for OpenAI’s search crawler. OpenAI uses a bot called oai-search (also referred to as OAI-SearchBot) to browse and index product content from the web. If your site blocks this crawler in your robots.txt file, your listings won’t be eligible for inclusion in ChatGPT shopping results. So, the first step for eCommerce store owners is to make sure that OAI-SearchBot is allowed to access your site.
Next up is making sure your items have structured product data. ChatGPT relies on the product information it can parse from your site, and the better that data is formatted, the better your chances of being included. This means having proper schema markup for each product—things like the product name, description, image, price, availability, and review rating. If your site uses a platform like BigCommerce or Shopify, many of these fields are already supported through built-in or third-party tools, but it’s worth checking to make sure everything is accurate and complete.
There’s also a tracking bonus. Links that appear in ChatGPT responses now include a utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter. That means you can start tracking referral traffic from ChatGPT using tools like Google Analytics. This will allow you to to see if users are discovering your products through AI-powered search, giving you a better sense of how this channel contributes to your overall sales funnel. I know a lot of our clients will be paying very close attention to this to see if this additional channel is indeed driving more traffic and sales!
How to Feed Your Products to ChatGPT
While you can’t currently submit a product feed directly to OpenAI (like you can with Google Shopping), the company says that functionality is coming. When that is available, we anticipate that merchants will likely have more control over how and when their products are listed in ChatGPT search results. But for now, you should spend some time optimizing your store’s SEO and structured data to make sure your items are included.
“Conversational” What?
This is just the beginning of what’s being called “conversational commerce”—the merging of AI chat with online shopping. Unlike traditional search engines, ChatGPT can tailor product suggestions based on requests and follow-up questions. It’s like having a personal shopper on standby 24/7.
Remember that search for “What are the best wireless headphones under $100?” Let’s refine it a bit more by asking ChatGPT to “Show only results that are ear buds and have a rating of four stars or more.”
By using follow-up questions, you can refine your selection down to just what you’re looking for, making this an invaluable tool for shoppers, especially when the holiday gift-giving season rolls around.
Next Steps eCommerce Store Owners Should Take
So, what should you do today? Start by checking your robots.txt file and allow the OAI-SearchBot crawler. Next, review your product pages and structured data. And finally, keep a close eye on your referral traffic to spot when ChatGPT starts driving visitors your way. If you’re a Your Store Wizards customer, we can help you get ahead of this shift with tools and audits to make sure your data is ready, just reach out to us at support@yourstorewizards.com and we’ll answer any questions you have!
Scott Sanfilippo began his eCommerce journey in 1994 by co-founding one of the Internet’s first online retailers, TheFerretStore.com, which was acquired by PetCo in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded the eCommerce design and marketing firm Solid Cactus, which was acquired by web.com in 2009. Today, Scott is the General Manager of Your Store Wizards and lives in Delray Beach, FL. Scott can be contacted at scott@yourstorewizards.com.