Online shopping in ChatGPT — how the new product search works

OpenAI has added full-fledged online shopping tools to ChatGPT Search. Now, when users ask about products, the chatbot immediately shows several recommendations with photos, reviews, and direct links to the pages where they can buy the selected items.

TechCrunch writes about it.

What's new in ChatGPT Search

The company promises that the service understands natural language and produces the most personalised results. At the start, the new product is available in the Fashion, Beauty, Household Goods, and Electronics categories. The feature is already available in GPT-4o for all ChatGPT users — Pro and Plus subscribers, free accounts, and even guests without registration worldwide.

OpenAI positions the update as a step in the competition with Google: the company believes that personalised search for goods and information can become a convincing alternative to traditional search results with advertising inserts. According to OpenAI, last week, users made more than a billion web queries on ChatGPT.

The developers emphasize that the new results are generated independently and do not contain advertising: the system relies on structured partner metadata such as prices, descriptions, and reviews, and does not receive commissions for purchases. Despite the fact that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had previously spoken out against advertising, he now allows for "restrained" ads, when a company receives only affiliate fees without selling priority items.

Soon, the service will start taking into account the "Memory" data for Pro and Plus plan holders to offer even more accurate recommendations based on past dialogues. As before, this feature will not work in the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein.

In addition to shopping, ChatGPT Search now shows popular queries as you type, similar to Google's autocomplete. The search is also integrated into WhatsApp: just send a message to the chatbot to get an up-to-date answer.

Previously, OpenAI tested a similar experience through the Operator AI agent platform, which analysed dozens of pages in minutes. Compared to it, ChatGPT Search with shopping mode is much faster and allows you to ask free-form queries without leaving the chat window.

As a reminder, the researchers found that the new OpenAI models — GPT-o3 and GPT-o4 mini — insert "labels" into the generated text. They resemble ordinary spaces that indicate the machine origin of the material.

We also wrote that ChatGPT has become a common tool for millions of users around the world. Nevertheless, experts warn that the chatbot turns into a "privacy black hole" if you entrust it with personal data.