OpenAI Adds Shopping to ChatGPT in a Challenge to Google
OpenAI is launching a shopping experience inside of ChatGPT, complete with product picks and buy buttons. WIRED spoke with Adam Fry, the company's search product lead, to ask how it all works. Photo-Illustration:OpenAI announced today that users will soon be able to buy products through ChatGPT. The rollout of shopping buttons for AI-powered search queries will come to everyone, whether they are a signed-in user or not. Shoppers will not be able to check out inside of ChatGPT; instead they will be redirected to the merchant's website to finish the transaction.
In a prelaunch demo for WIRED, Adam Fry, the ChatGPT search product lead at OpenAI, demonstrated how the updated user experience could be used to help people using the tool for product research decide which espresso machine or office chair to buy. The product recommendations shown to prospective shoppers are based on what ChatGPT remembers about a user's preferences as well as product reviews pulled from across the web.
Fry says ChatGPT users are already running over a billion web searches per week, and that people are using the tool to research a wide breadth of shopping categories, like beauty, home goods, and electronics. The product results in ChatGPT for best office chairs, one of WIRED's rigorously tested and widely read buying guides, included a link to our reporting in the sources tab. (Although the business side of Conde Nast, WIRED's parent company, signed a licensing deal last year with OpenAI so the company can surface our content, the editorial team retains independence in how we cover the startup.)
Searching for espresso machines inside ChatGPT. Image Courtesy of OpenAI
The new user experience of buying stuff inside of ChatGPT shares many similarities to Google Shopping. In the interfaces of both, when you click on the image of a budget office chair that tickles your fancy, multiple retailers, like Amazon and Walmart, are listed on the right side of the screen, with buttons for completing the purchase. There is one major difference between shopping through ChatGPT versus Google, for now: the results you see in OpenAI searches are not paid placements, but organic results. 'They are not ads,' says Fry. 'They are not sponsored.'
While some product recommendations that appear inside of Google Shopping show up because retailers paid for them to be there, that's just one mechanism Google uses to decide which products to list in Shopping searches. Websites that publish product reviews are constantly tweaking the content of their buying recommendations in an effort to convince the opaque Google algorithm that the website includes high quality reviews of products that have been thoroughly tested by real humans. Google favors those more considered reviews in search results and will rank them highly when a user is researching a product. To land one of the top spots in a Google search can lead to more of those users buying the product through the website, potentially earning the publisher millions of dollars in affiliate revenue.
So, how does ChatGPT choose which products to recommend? Why were those specific espresso machines and office chairs listed first when the user typed the prompt?
'It's not looking for specific signals that are in some algorithm,' says Fry. According to him, this will be a shopping experience that's more personalized and conversational, rather than keyword-focused. 'It's trying to understand how people are reviewing this, how people are talking about this, what the pros and cons are,' says Fry. If you say that you prefer only buying black clothes from a specific retailer, then ChatGPT will supposedly store that information in its memory the next time you ask for advice about what shirt to buy, giving you recommendations that align with your tastes.
The reviews that ChatGPT features for products will pull from a blend of online sources, including editorial publishers like WIRED as well as user-generated forums like Reddit. Fry says that users can tell ChatGPT which types of reviews to prioritize when curating a list of recommended products.
One of the most pressing questions for online publishers with this new release is likely how affiliate revenue will work in this situation. Currently, if you read WIRED's review of the best office chairs and decide to purchase one through our link, we get a cut of the revenue and it supports our journalism. How will affiliate revenue work inside of ChatGPT shopping when the tool recommends an office chair that OpenAI knows is a good pick because WIRED, among others, gave it a good review?
'We are going to be experimenting with a whole bunch of different ways that this can work,' says Fry. He didn't share specific plans, saying that providing high quality recommendations is OpenAI's first priority right now, and that the company might try different affiliate revenue models in the future.
When asked if he sees this as potentially a meaningful revenue drive in the long-term, Fry similarly says that OpenAI is just focused on the user experience first and will iterate on ChatGPT shopping as the startup learns more post-release. OpenAI has big revenue goals; according to reporting from The Information, the company expects to bring in $125 billion in revenue by 2029. Last year, OpenAI had just under $4 billion in revenue. It's unclear how big of part the company expects affiliate revenue to play in reaching that goal. CEO Sam Altman floated the idea of affiliate fees adding to the company's revenue, in a recent interview with Stratechery newsletter writer Ben Thomspon.
This is not the first shopping adjacent release from OpenAI in 2025. Its AI agent, called Operator, can take control of web browsers and click around, potentially helping users buy groceries or assist with vacation booking, though my initial impressions found the feature to be fairly clunky at release. Perplexity, one of OpenAI's competitors in AI-powered search, launched 'Buy with Pro' late last year, where users could also shop directly inside of the app. Additionally, the Google Shopping tab currently includes a 'Researched with AI' section for some queries, with summaries of online reviews as well as recommended picks.
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