ChatGPT is coming after Google, once again. The hugely popular chatbot will soon add the ability to shop directly from a web search.
When searching for a specific product in ChatGPT Search, the chatbot will provide recommendations, images, and reviews for the items.
There will also be direct links to web pages to purchase the products. To begin, there will be a few categories of products available, including fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics.
While this might sound very similar to Google Shopping, there is a big difference. Adam Fry, ChatGPT search product lead at OpenAI, told Wired how it differs:
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.”
According to Fry, the recommendations aren’t based on an algorithm.
“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.
OpenAI won’t receive a kickback from purchases. That’s great news, and something that might help make ChatGPT an unbiased shopping companion, something you can’t say about Google Shopping and its pages of low-quality results.
At least for subscribers of the Pro and Plus tiers, they will soon be able to integrate the recently improved memory option with the shopping feature. It can reference a previous chat to make better product recommendations.
Other smaller features will also arrive for ChatGPT Search. It will soon display trending searches when you start typing a question, something you’ll recognize from Google Search’s autocomplete. WhatsApp integration has also improved as you can message the chatbot to search.
The new feature comes as ChatGPT Search continues to grow. OpenAI says that there were more than 1 billion web searches made on ChatGPT last week.
This isn’t the first time OpenAI and ChatGPT have jumped into the world of shopping. The company unveiled the Operator AI agent back in January 2025 that will perform online tasks without assistance. One of those tasks is shopping.
Operator is only available to subscribers of the $200 monthly Pro tier.
While you’ll need to subscribe to unlock some of the most cutting-edge ChatGPT features, the company is also slowly giving free users access to some nice features.
ChatGPT Deep Research is now available for free users, in a lightweight version. You are also limited to just five Deep Research queries per month.
