Ask ChatGPT for "comfortable trainers for lots of walking around town, under €100" and you don't get a list of links. You get products with photos, prices, a summary of what buyers think and links to the stores that sell them.

For an online store, that's a new way in, and it's already showing. According to Adobe's data on US retail sites, visits coming from AI assistants were up 138% in May 2026 on the year before. The obvious question is how to get your products in there.

The short answer is that you can't pay for a spot. But you can do quite a lot to make sure ChatGPT has good information about what you sell.

How ChatGPT chooses which products to show

OpenAI explains it in its Help Center. ChatGPT shows a product when it thinks it's relevant to what the person asked for, also taking into account what it knows about them, such as saved preferences. If someone has said they don't like loud colours, it may leave out the neon options.

To decide, it looks at product data (price, description, features), information from other websites and public reviews, which it summarises into what people like and dislike. When several stores sell the same item, it ranks them by availability, price, quality and whether they're the maker or main seller.

Two details matter in particular:

  • The results aren't ads. OpenAI says products are chosen independently and that ads are kept separate. There's no way to pay your way into that selection.
  • Not everything is shown. Even if your product fits, it may not appear. The selection depends on the question, each person's context and what ChatGPT knows about each product.

Where the information comes from

This is the part you can influence. Information about your products reaches ChatGPT in several ways:

  • Your own website. OpenAI crawls pages with a bot called OAI-SearchBot. If your store blocks it, your store won't appear in ChatGPT's search answers.
  • Shopify. If your store runs on Shopify, OpenAI says your product data already reaches it through Shopify Catalog, with nothing for you to do. Shopify does have its own conditions, such as products shipping to the US or Canada; I go through them in how to use AI in Shopify.
  • A catalogue sent directly. Stores can apply to send OpenAI a regularly updated file of their products. For now it's mainly aimed at selling in the US.
  • Other websites. Comparison sites, marketplaces, blogs and review sites that talk about your products.

Because ChatGPT combines all these sources, what it says about your product depends on what it finds across all of them, not just on your site.

What you can check today

None of this guarantees you'll appear, but it's what's in your hands:

  1. Make sure your site doesn't block OAI-SearchBot. You'll find this in your store's robots.txt file. Note that it's separate from GPTBot, the bot OpenAI uses to train its models: you can block one and allow the other.
  2. Complete, clear product pages. The fields OpenAI asks for in that product file make a good minimum: title, description, brand, price, availability and an image. Then whatever would make someone choose your product: measurements, materials, who it's for. How to prepare your catalogue for AI goes into the detail.
  3. The same details everywhere. If a product is 40 cm on your site and 45 cm on a marketplace, ChatGPT may end up with the wrong figure. The same goes for prices and names.
  4. Public reviews. ChatGPT summarises what people say about a product. If nobody has said anything, it has little to go on.
  5. Up-to-date prices and stock. OpenAI admits that price changes can take a while to show. You can't control that delay, but you can make sure your own site always has the right figure.

What's out of your hands

Don't lose sleep over this part. ChatGPT may write its own product titles and descriptions, add its own labels such as "budget-friendly", and weigh things differently from one person to the next. You control none of that.

Nor does it make much sense to talk about "ranking", because it changes with every conversation. What you can measure is the outcome: visits to your store from chatgpt.com in your analytics, and which products those visitors look at.

When the shopper reaches your store

People arriving from ChatGPT have already done some comparing, but they still have specific questions: whether the size will fit, whether the colour matches the photo, how it differs from the model next to it. In ChatGPT they could ask and get an answer straight away. If nobody answers them in your store, the gap shows.

So as well as looking after what ChatGPT knows about your products, it pays to look after what happens next. An assistant inside your store, such as SmartShop AI, can answer those questions with your catalogue in front of it.

There's no trick to showing up in ChatGPT. It comes down mostly to what has always sold: information that's complete, consistent and easy to find.