OpenAI launched shopping research in ChatGPT, a feature that creates personalized buyer’s guides by researching products across the web. The tool is rolling out today on mobile and web for logged-in users on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans.
The company is offering nearly unlimited usage through the holidays.
What’s New
Shopping research works differently from standard ChatGPT responses. Users describe what they need, answer clarifying questions about budget and preferences, and receive a buyer’s guide after a few minutes.
The feature pulls information including price, availability, reviews, specs, and images from across the web. You can guide the research by marking products as “Not interested” or “More like this” as options appear.
OpenAI’s announcement states:
“Shopping research is built for that deeper kind of decision-making. It turns product discovery into a conversation: asking smart questions to understand what you care about, pulling accurate, up-to-date details from high-quality sources, and bringing options back to you to refine the results.”
The company says the tool performs best in categories like electronics, beauty, home and garden, kitchen and appliances, and sports and outdoor.
Technical Details
Shopping research is powered by a shopping-specialized GPT-5 mini variant post-trained on GPT-5-Thinking-mini.
OpenAI’s internal evaluation shows shopping research reached 52% product accuracy on multi-constraint queries, compared with 37% for ChatGPT Search.
Product accuracy measures how well responses meet user requirements for attributes like price, color, material, and specs. The company designed the system to update and refine results in real time based on user feedback.
Privacy & Data Sharing
OpenAI states that user chats are never shared with retailers. Results are organic and based on publicly available retail sites.
Merchants who want to appear in shopping research results can follow an allowlisting process through OpenAI.
Limitations
OpenAI acknowledges the feature isn’t perfect. The model may make mistakes about product details like price and availability. The company encourages users to visit merchant sites for the most accurate information.
Why This Matters
This feature pulls more of the product comparison journey into one place.
As shopping research handles more of the “which one should I buy?” work inside ChatGPT, some of that early-stage discovery could happen without a traditional search click.
For retailers and affiliate publishers, that raises the stakes for inclusion in these results. Visibility may depend on how well your products and pages are represented in OpenAI’s shopping system and allowlisting process.
Looking Ahead
Shopping research in ChatGPT is now available to logged-in users starting today. OpenAI plans to add direct purchasing through ChatGPT for merchants participating in Instant Checkout, though no timeline was provided.
Featured Image: Koshiro K/Shutterstock
