How to rank in ChatGPT Shopping: how products get into ChatGPT answers

How shopping in ChatGPT developed

How ChatGPT chooses products and merchants

OpenAI’s help article on shopping in ChatGPT search says:

• A product is shown when ChatGPT judges it relevant to the user’s query and context (including memory and custom instructions). Not every matching product is shown.
• Data sources are structured metadata from merchants and third-party providers (price, product description and so on) and other third-party content such as reviews.
• Merchants for a selected product are ranked by availability, price, quality and whether the merchant is the maker or primary seller of the item.
• It is not advertising: product results are selected independently and are not influenced by OpenAI partnerships. Ads in ChatGPT are a separate format; see ChatGPT ads.
• Merchants do not have to do anything for their products to appear in ChatGPT, but OpenAI offers direct product feeds to keep the data up to date.

The ChatGPT product feed

OpenAI’s developer documentation describes the product feed as a way to share structured product data with OpenAI so ChatGPT can accurately surface products in search and shopping experiences. The essentials:

• the format is a CSV or JSON file with identifiers, descriptions, prices, inventory, images and fulfillment options;
• required fields make price and availability display correctly, while recommended ones such as rich media and reviews, according to OpenAI, help ranking and user trust;
• after a sample feed is validated, the merchant sends full catalog snapshots daily;
• direct feed access is granted by application on the ChatGPT merchants page. Check there whether the programme is available in your country.

What a store can do now

1. Let OAI-SearchBot in. This is the crawler that surfaces sites in ChatGPT search; if it is blocked in robots.txt or a firewall, your store pages will not appear in answers. More in AI crawlers and robots.txt.
2. Build complete product pages: exact name with model, specifications, price in euros, stock, delivery times and costs, return terms. Put the important details in text, not only in images.
3. Add Product and Offer markup with the same price and availability as shown on the page. How to mark up: schema markup for AI.
4. Keep data current. A wrong price or “out of stock” is a bad signal, since ChatGPT ranks merchants by availability and price.
5. Collect reviews of products and the store, including on independent sites: ChatGPT relies on third-party content too. See brand mentions for AI visibility.
6. If you are the manufacturer, make that obvious on the site: OpenAI names “maker or primary seller” as one of the merchant ranking factors.
7. Check the answers: ask ChatGPT about products in your category in Estonian, Russian and English and see which stores and sources it names.

What about Google

Google has its own path: shopping in AI Mode is built on the Shopping Graph, Google’s product database, which as of May 2025 held more than 50 billion product listings, over 2 billion of them refreshed every hour. Stores submit products to it through Google Merchant Center. Much of the work is shared: complete product pages, accurate prices and stock, markup and reviews help in both ChatGPT and Google.

At JW2D we check which products and stores ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name in your category and prepare the store’s site for those answers; see AI search optimization.