How to get your products recommended by ChatGPT

Yes. ChatGPT shopping is the part of ChatGPT that suggests products for a request and shows them side by side with price, reviews and features. OpenAI described it in an announcement on 24 March 2026: a shopper describes a budget, preferences and constraints, can upload a picture to find similar items, and narrows the results in conversation.

Products reach those results through feeds that merchants share with OpenAI and through the web pages ChatGPT search reads. A shop can work on both, and the second is open to every shop today.

Through a product feed, sent by the shop itself or by a platform it already uses. OpenAI's getting-started guide for merchants says onboarding product feeds 'is currently available to approved partners', and links an application form. OpenAI's 24 March announcement adds that feeds can also arrive through third-party providers like Salesforce and Stripe, and Shopify sends eligible stores' products itself, as set out below.

Two limits matter for a UK shop. OpenAI's product feed specification says the standard upload 'currently targets the US', and other countries need OpenAI's confirmation before you use them. Some products are refused in any market: the getting-started guide's policy lists age-restricted products such as alcohol, nicotine and gambling, along with weapons and prescription-only medicines. If you already keep a product feed for Google as a tab-delimited or CSV file, the specification also accepts that Google-compatible format once OpenAI confirms it for your feed; XML feeds and spreadsheet files are not accepted on that route.

Shops on Shopify may already be listed. Shopify's help page on selling on ChatGPT says the channel is active by default for eligible stores, and that you don't need to do anything for products to be discovered through Shopify Catalog. For a UK shop, the first requirement is the one that matters: the store must sell to customers in the United States, though it can be based outside the US. Shopify also asks for completed terms of service, privacy policy and return and refund policy, and says selling in ChatGPT carries no fee beyond your usual payment processing.

With a feed, ChatGPT reads what you send. The specification asks for nine fields per item, among them the title, a factual description, the product page address, the brand, the main image, the availability and the price. OpenAI's key concepts page for commerce says the required fields get price and availability shown correctly, while recommended attributes such as rich media, reviews and performance signals 'improve ranking, relevance, and user trust'. Ratings go in as a review count and a star rating for the product itself; the specification says to exclude seller and store reviews, which have fields of their own.

Without a feed, ChatGPT finds products the way it finds any web page. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot 'will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers'. Shopify's page on Shopify Catalog and product discovery says the same from the seller's side: products are discoverable through web crawling and indexing as well as through its catalogue, and may still be found that way when a store switches catalogue access off.

An answer also draws on what other websites say about a product. How ChatGPT decides which businesses to recommend explains why reviews, roundups and comparison pages written by others carry weight, and which review sites AI reads covers the reviews it quotes.

OpenAI's own pages give different answers. The key concepts page still opens with Instant Checkout, in which ChatGPT shows the checkout, the merchant charges the payment, and OpenAI is not the merchant of record. OpenAI's 24 March announcement says the first version of Instant Checkout 'did not offer the level of flexibility' it wanted, and that merchants can use their own checkout while OpenAI focuses on product discovery.

Shopify's help page calls ChatGPT a discovery channel that sends buyers to the shop's own checkout. Treat buying inside ChatGPT as unsettled, and put your effort into being found.

You can advertise, and advertising is a separate setting from being found. In OpenAI's feed format each product carries its own search, ads and checkout settings: search is on by default, and ads and checkout stay off until you set them up. The piece on whether you can advertise your business on ChatGPT covers where the ads sit in an answer.

Let ChatGPT's crawler in. Run the free AI crawler checker on your shop's domain. It reads your robots.txt and shows, crawler by crawler, whether OAI-SearchBot and the other AI crawlers may fetch your pages.

Write each product page like a feed row. Put the full title with the variant, a factual description, the price, stock, delivery and returns on the page as plain text that loads without scripts. These are the facts OpenAI's specification asks for, and the page is what ChatGPT reads when there is no feed.

Add the barcode number. The specification takes one GTIN per item and says to leave it out when the item has none, so fill it in wherever your supplier gives you one.

Ask for product reviews. Ask buyers to review the item as well as the shop, and show the count and average rating on the product page. A feed keeps product ratings and store ratings in separate fields, and ChatGPT shows reviews beside each product it suggests.

Get your products named on other sites. Ask ChatGPT the questions your customers ask, open the pages each answer cites, and pitch the gift guides, roundups and comparison posts among them.

Make sure Bing has your product pages. Microsoft says the grounding infrastructure behind Copilot also powers ChatGPT. Submit your sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools and check that your product pages are indexed.

If you sell to the US, take the feed route. On Shopify, go to Sales channels, then Agentic, and check ChatGPT is on. On another platform, apply through the form linked from OpenAI's getting-started guide.

Ask ChatGPT the questions your customers type, in a logged-out window, for example 'best waterproof walking boots under £150'. Note which products and shops each answer names and which pages it cites, and ask the same questions again every few weeks so you can see what changes.

For a first reading, check if your business is on ChatGPT with the free checker: it puts 3 buyer questions about your category to ChatGPT in a logged-out session and shows whether each answer named you and which pages it cited, without an account. For a weekly reading, Discoverable's plans check your 10 tracked prompts weekly on every AI service it measures and the rest of your prompts monthly. The Scale plan adds product-line tracking: up to 5 product lines for each business you track, each with its own prompts, competitors and score. AI visibility for ecommerce covers how shops use Discoverable.