How to get your products into ChatGPT shopping: the feed, the crawler, and the merchant application

If you sell products online, ChatGPT is already answering “where can I buy” questions about things like yours. Whether your store shows up in those answers comes down to three things that OpenAI documents in detail, which are a product feed in its format, a crawler that you have to allow, and a merchant application. This post goes through each of them using OpenAI’s own documentation, including the parts that changed in 2026.

What “in ChatGPT shopping” means now

In September 2025 OpenAI launched in-chat checkout, where a shopper could buy without leaving the conversation. In March 2026 it pulled that back and moved purchases onto merchants’ own sites, so discovery and recommendation still happen in the chat but the sale happens on your store. OpenAI’s developer documentation now describes three integration models: merchant-hosted checkout (you implement the Agentic Checkout Spec), delegated payment (your payment provider implements it), and in-chat. For most stores, the practical goal today is to get your products into the discovery feed and to make sure that the handoff to your site lands on a page that’s ready to sell.

The feed

ChatGPT’s shopping results draw on the product feeds that merchants submit, not only on what a crawler finds. The feed specification lists nine required fields for discovery:

item_id, title, description, url, brand, seller_name, image_url, availability, price

The item ID has to be stable and unique per item or variant. The title should include the selected variant, so “Runner, men’s 10, slate” rather than “Runner”. URLs must be absolute, and HTTPS is preferred.

Two of the optional flags matter. is_eligible_search defaults to true and controls whether the item can appear in results, and setting it to false also disables checkout eligibility. is_eligible_checkout defaults to false and only takes effect when search eligibility is on and checkout is enabled for your account. In other words, discovery is on by default once your feed is accepted, and checkout is something you opt into later.

JSONL is OpenAI’s preferred format, and it also accepts Google-compatible feeds (UTF-8 tab-delimited or comma-delimited, optionally gzipped). If you already produce a Google Merchant Center feed, you’re most of the way there.

For delivery, OpenAI recommends sending the full feed once a day by file upload to its SFTP server and then pushing updates through the API during the day. Each snapshot should overwrite the same file, and individual products get upserted through the API as prices and stock change. A feed with stale availability is worse than no feed, because an assistant will recommend something you can’t sell and the shopper will remember who sent them.

The crawler

Separately from the feed, ChatGPT’s search feature uses its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, to surface websites. OpenAI’s documentation is unambiguous that sites which opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, so check your robots.txt for a disallow on it. Many hosts and plugins added blanket AI blocks in 2024, and some of them caught the search crawler along with the training one. GPTBot is the training crawler, and blocking it has no effect on search. OAI-SearchBot is the crawler that determines whether your pages can be shown. We covered how to tell the bots apart in the post on blocking AI agents.

The application

Feed onboarding isn’t self-serve yet. OpenAI’s get-started guide says it is “currently available to approved partners,” and the application is a form at chatgpt.com/merchants. The guide also lists what won’t be accepted: adult content, age-restricted products such as alcohol, nicotine and gambling, weapons, prescription medications, unlicensed financial products, and legally restricted goods.

If you’re on Shopify, much of this runs through the platform. Shopify was part of the original launch and has its own settings for AI sales channels, so check your store’s channel settings before applying directly. Etsy sellers were also included at launch.

The handoff to your site

The handoff is the part that people forget. When ChatGPT recommends your product and the shopper clicks through, they should land on that product, at the price the assistant quoted, with a checkout that works without an account, a pop-up or a CAPTCHA in the way. Walmart’s experience in early 2026 is the cautionary tale here. In-chat purchases converted at about a third the rate of sending shoppers to its own site, which is part of why OpenAI moved checkout back to merchants. The upside of that change is that your site is where the sale happens, and the obligation that comes with it is that your site has to be ready for a visitor who has already decided.

There are two checks you can do today. Open your best-selling product page in a private browser window and try to buy it without logging in, and look at whether the product URLs in your feed resolve to the exact variant or only to a category page.

The order we’d do things in

1. Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt. It takes five minutes, and nothing else works without it.
2. Produce the feed. If you have a Google Merchant Center feed, start from that and confirm that all nine required fields are present for every item.
3. Apply at chatgpt.com/merchants, or turn on the channel in your platform’s settings if you’re on Shopify.
4. Fix the handoff, so that product URLs go to the exact variant, prices match, and checkout works for a stranger.
5. Keep the feed current with a daily snapshot and API updates for stock and price.

The free assessment checks the first and fourth of those from a datacenter browser, the way an assistant would see them, and tells you what’s in the way.