OpenAI has announced that users would be able to use ChatGPT for shopping soon, confirming earlier reports. Shopping buttons will be rolled out for everyone, whether or not they are signed-in users. Shoppers won’t be able to check out from within ChatGPT, rather they would be directed to a merchant website to complete the transaction.
During a pre-launch demo for Wired, ChatGPT Search Product Lead Adam Fry said that 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 new user experience of buying stuff inside of ChatGPT shares many similarities to Google Shopping. Fry also mentioned there was a key difference between shopping through ChatGPT and Google — OpenAI search results are organic, and don’t contain product placements.
READ: OpenAI to integrate Shopify with ChatGPT for shopping (April 22, 2025)
“It’s not looking for specific signals that are in some algorithm,” said 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, Fry added while talking about the search mechanism. It is not clear yet how affiliate revenue would work with this.
This is not the first shopping-adjacent release from OpenAI in 2025. OpenAI’s new AI agent, called Operator, can navigate web browsers and perform tasks like buying groceries or booking vacations. However, early impressions described the feature as clunky at launch. OpenAI’s competitor Perplexity also launched its “Buy with Pro” feature last year.