OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Shopping Research Feature Ahead of Black Friday

ChatGPT Gets Major Shopping Upgrades in Time for Black Friday

Imad is a senior reporter covering Google and internet culture. Hailing from Texas, Imad started his journalism career in 2013 and has amassed bylines with The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, Tom's Guide and Wired, among others. ChatGPT shopping research is a new, more advanced shopping assistant that gives the AI chatbot more ways to help users find the right products and is available now for all users on mobile and web ahead of Black Friday, OpenAI said in a press release on Monday. Unlike the ChatGPT shopping release from earlier this year, this new version asks clarifying questions and "researches deeply across the internet," OpenAI said. It's powered by a GPT-5 mini model and is tuned to look at high-quality review sites and Reddit to help find products. With shopping tasks, OpenAI says this model outperforms GPT-5 Thinking, which is one of the company's advanced research models. ChatGPT shopping research also uses its memory from past conversations to help "deliver a personalized buyer's guide in minutes." OpenAI demoed ChatGPT shopping research at a press event in New York last week. There, the company took questions and also had stations set up so that members of the press could ask various shopping questions. When asking for a cute air fryer or a Disney-themed gift for a dad, the AI would ask some clarifying questions before diving in. The results, however, weren't otherworldly. In the case of the air fryer, the model that ChatGPT shopping research recommended wasn't the best, another reporter present at the event noted. And in regard to the Disney gift for a father, everything was Mickey Mouse-themed. At the moment, OpenAI isn't monetizing this feature, meaning it won't take affiliate revenue from retailers for sending customers their way. The model is also largely text-based, so there isn't an in-app instant checkout, which is a new feature that was released earlier this year in partnership with certain online retailers. OpenAI says ChatGPT shopping research will source review sites so that users can go there to read the full review and potentially click on any buy buttons. Whether that's how people will use ChatGPT shopping research remains to be seen. ChatGPT shopping research is also available in Pulse, the feature for pro users that gives them personalized morning briefings. OpenAI also says shopping research data isn't shared with retailers and avoids low-quality, spammy sites when sifting through information online. The company also admitted that AI isn't perfect and that the shopping assistant might make mistakes. ChatGPT shopping research comes as OpenAI is facing stiff competition from Google and needs to find a path toward profitability, fast. Luckily, consumers are increasingly turning to AI for researching products when shopping online, with ChatGPT being a top destination. OpenAI has committed to spending $1.4 trillion on data center infrastructure which would require the company to become a $1 trillion business by 2030. At the moment, OpenAI is making $20 billion in annual revenue but is lost $5 billion in 2024, according to a report from The Information. Per leaked financial documents, OpenAI is on track to lose $74 billion in 2028 alone, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Of its 800 million weekly users, 20 million are subscribers, per an April report.

ChatGPT's new shopping research tool is fast, fun, and free - but can it out-shop me?

It is rolling out on mobile and web for all logged-in ChatGPT users. The holiday season is upon us, and the biggest shopping event of the season, Black Friday, is just a few days away. In response, OpenAI launched a new feature in ChatGPT designed to help you with your shopping tasks -- for free. While the company has previously launched AI agents focused on automating the order-placing process, such as OpenAI Atlas and Instant Checkout, shopping research focuses on helping you find what you want to purchase in the first place, acting as an "expert personal shopper." Also: Best Black Friday deals 2025: 55+ deals on TVs, laptops, streaming, and more Similar to Deep Research, when prompted with a product description, ChatGPT will now sift through the internet to put together a guide for you. It will also ask you a series of clarifying questions, using the context from past conversations, and considering product reviews to develop your guide. Shopping research is designed to act as an assistant that can create a personalized shopping experience tailored to your specific criteria and needs in just a few minutes. OpenAI said research outputs can help with a variety of different tasks, including finding a product that meets specific criteria, for example, "help me find a smartphone with 18+hours of battery life under $1,500." Other examples include finding dupes or lookalikes of a product, comparing different products with a detailed trade-off list that is catered toward your specific needs, finding product deals, and helping you choose gifts for people on your list. Also: Why Amazon really doesn't want Perplexity's AI browser shopping for you The entire experience is powered by a version of GPT-5-mini that was trained specifically for shopping tasks, according to OpenAI. The company said that it was trained to "read trusted sites, cite reliable sources, and synthesize information across many sources," as well as refine its prompts in real-time. When compared to other ChatGPT models, such as GPT-5-Thinking or ChatGPT Search, shopping research leads in product accuracy. Yet, OpenAI acknowledged that it occasionally makes mistakes about product details, such as pricing and availability, and recommended that users always double-check its work. I found the experience of using it to be interactive and intuitive. To get started, all logged-in ChatGPT users, including those with Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans, can either ask a shopping question, which will automatically activate the feature, or select the "Shopping research" option from the menu in the text box. In your first prompt, describe what you want it to do for you. Then, ChatGPT will follow up with questions pertinent to your search, such as your budget or the features that are important to you. It will also use the context it knows about you, if you have those personalization toggles on, to tailor the response toward you. As it conducts the research, it will display sample products it has found. With every product, you can indicate whether you are interested or not and why you made that decision, guiding the research further. This was my favorite part of using the feature, as it felt like an engaging Tinder-like experience, where you can quickly click through to indicate whether you like or dislike. Then, after a few minutes, it will provide you with a personalized buyer's guide that includes the top products, comparisons, and links that take you directly to the retailer's website to place the order. In the future, the company plans to integrate this feature into the Instant Checkout experience, enabling you to make purchases directly on the site. Also: I let ChatGPT Atlas do my Walmart shopping for me - here's how the AI browser agent did OpenAI said that user chats are never shared with retailers and that the results are generated organically, based on publicly available websites. Sites that want to appear in results must allow OpenAI's crawlers to access their site, which can be done by following the instructions for the allowlisting process. When I asked OpenAI how users can trust that the sites and products being recommended are from legitimate sources, I was told that the model was trained to avoid low-quality and spam sites, to help ensure users get the best user experience. At the same event, I had the opportunity to try the feature myself, and I had a lot more fun than I anticipated. I got a sneak peek at the new feature, and the biggest standout to me was how interactive the experience was. For example, in one demo, the user uploaded an image of Jeremy Strong in Succession and asked where he could find a similar turtleneck, for a lower price. While you likely could have reverse image searched that on Google, this time the user was able to enter a quick prompt, go through the refining "not interested" or "more like this" process, and get a set of options. In another instance, I wanted to test finding suitable products for my dog. I typed in the prompt, "I want to buy dog treats for a 15-pound Yorkie." It then asked follow-up questions, such as "Preferred treat types?" with multiple-choice answers that read: "Crunchy biscuits, jerky bites, soft chews, and freeze-dried." Then it showed me the quick feedback experience, where I could indicate whether I was more or less interested in the products. I was then able to say "not interested" and provide reasoning, such as "too expensive" or "my dog didn't like this brand," which helped narrow down the options. While the shopping guide was ultimately not groundbreaking, I found it helpful and would have felt comfortable purchasing one of its recommended products, or at least using it as a starting point. Then I told ChatGPT that I wanted a dress for a specific semi-formal occasion that is fitted, features a pop of color, and is around $100. Out of the options that it gave me, some were so good that I took a picture on my phone to reference later. Also: Beware of getting your product buying advice from AI for one big reason, says Ziff Davis CEO But my favorite use case was using it to find gifts for people. Gift-giving is something I take particular pride in and enjoy doing, so I wanted to see if the AI could outdo me. I built a complex prompt: "I am looking for a gift for my friend who loves reading, has a 12lb yorkie, moved to a new apartment, wants to travel more next year, and is obsessed with Mickey Mouse. She is 32 years old and lives in NYC." It asked which gift themes I liked, of which I selected all: "reading and books, dog accessories, home decor, and travel essentials." Then it provided some fun options. Of course, because I entered so many different characteristics, some product suggestions missed the mark, such as Mickey-themed everything. However, some were thoughtful, with my favorite being a gift card to The Strand, a bookstore I happen to love in NYC, and perhaps I wouldn't have known about it if I didn't live here. Ultimately, do I think it will completely replace how I shop? No. This is mostly because I love the art of finding the perfect product online, whether it's a gift for someone or something I need myself. However, I do think it could be a helpful, time-saving tool, especially if I'm trying to stay within a specific budget.

I Was Among the First to Try ChatGPT's Ambitious, But Half-Baked Online Shopper

OpenAI researcher Manuka Stratta is on the team building the shopping discovery experience. (Credit Emily Forlini) OpenAI has unveiled a new shopping experience for ChatGPT, and we were among the first to demo it at a press event in New York City. "Since people are already using ChatGPT for shopping, we might as well double down and help them use it more," an OpenAI spokesperson said at the event. Well, it's more like a shopping "discovery" experience, as OpenAI employees put it, since you can't purchase products within the chat window. The company hopes to eventually integrate it with the Instant Checkout tech that allows you to do one-click purchases from Walmart and Target inside ChatGPT. However, for this launch, OpenAI didn't have enough time to enroll merchants and release it before the holiday shopping season. The tech is quite ambitious, with multiple new interfaces. OpenAI built it on a fine-tuned version of the GPT-5.1 mini model, and it lives within ChatGPT's Deep Research function. It's available now for all logged-in users to try. In my tests, it incorporated the correct price and flagged deals. However, I wouldn't hand over all your shopping needs to ChatGPT just yet. Like most AI-powered experiences I've tested, it's not ready to revolutionize online shopping. According to an OpenAI internal metric, a standard ChatGPT conversation will find the product you're looking for just 37% of the time, whereas this new shopping research experience boosts that to 64%. Still, it's "not perfect," OpenAI admits. "Shopping research might make mistakes about product details like price and availability, and we encourage you to visit the merchant site for the most accurate details." ChatGPT: Help Me Find a Specific Couch To get started, either select the shopping option under Deep Research, or type /shopping in the chat window. My initial prompt asked for an off-white sectional priced below $6,000. I don't necessarily have that much to spend on a couch, but I wanted to see how expansive the tech could search, rather than just finding the cheapest option on the web. OpenAI researcher Manuka Stratta recommended I specify delivery before Christmas to see if it could take into account shipping timelines. The first thing that popped up was a sort of mini algorithm trainer, shown below. It surfaced images of about 10 sample couches in different styles, and I gave them all a quick yes or no. (Apologies for the picture quality. It's a photo of the demo computers set up at the event.) Then, it crunched the data and surfaced its Top Pick, complete with bullet points, a table, and links to websites. The links mostly go to the manufacturer's website, although there were also reviews from Architectural Digest. You can also see all the other products ChatGPT initially surfaced, just in case you want to go back. This is one of the extra-mile features OpenAI built, and part of the reason the product comes off as ambitious and unique. The Top Pick was close, but I wasn't ready to buy without further research. Result: A Flawed, Yet Interesting Departure From Core ChatGPT One issue is the tech can't distinguish between real and fake customer reviews, and it doesn't know if a product appears popular simply because it's being advertised by the company. "It's impossible to know which is real; it's a hard task," an OpenAI employee explained at the event. To get around this, the model leans heavily on Reddit reviews since the company has deemed them more "organic." (OpenAI also has a content licensing partnership with Reddit.) ChatGPT didn't cite any Reddit posts in my couch search, but there were other problems. For one, most of its suggestions failed my price test and were far below the $6,000 range. When I gave that budget, I expected them to be close to it, since it suggested I was willing to spend more. Instead, the recommendations were mostly around $1,300-$1,600. I mentioned this to Stratta, who said the team would look at tweaking the price programming. They were still refining the product, even just a few days before launch. If you have this problem, she recommended giving it a more specific price range, such as $4,000 to $6,000. Another problem was how long it took to search. I stared at the monitor for what felt like a lifetime, although it was only about 3 minutes. If I was surfing Google or another website, there would be almost no wait time as I browsed the selection, changed the filters, etc. Other searches we did later took over five minutes, and one never finished before the event ended. Stratta said the Wi-Fi might be struggling, but long load times is a common problem with ChatGPT's deep thinking products. The idea is the longer you wait, the better the answer. However, I could see this losing shoppers' attention. The best solution might be to leave ChatGPT up in a separate tab and do something else in the meantime. I refined my search, adding that the couch should be under 110 inches on the longest side and pet-friendly. It shopped for 2 minutes and surfaced a $1,759.96 option from a brand I'd never heard of (and wasn't really my taste). I realized I had never heard of almost all the brands it had produced so far, despite my relative familiarity with this market after hours of searching on my own. That could be a positive thing since it exposed me to new sites. But it felt off to not include the most popular furniture websites, like Wayfair, Ashley Furniture, Raymour & Flanigan, West Elm, Crate & Barrel, and Room & Board. I refined the search and asked it to look for Pottery Barn and West Elm couches. Happily, it was able to take this into account in the new suggestions it surfaced. But the link for the West Elm couch I liked took me to a strange version of the company's website, with no price listed, and no place to click to buy. Perhaps ChatGPT had crawled a cached page. I'm not sure. In the end, it would be faster to browse West Elm myself and simply set filters for what I'm looking for. Prediction: Chatbots Are More Likely to Be Personal Shoppers In the end, I commend OpenAI for designing a unique experience I had never seen in ChatGPT. It helped find information in a customized fashion, but given the half-baked feel, I'm not rushing to use it over a typical Google search or looking on the actual websites of the couch brands. We can expect more shopping experiences from ChatGPT as OpenAI seeks new revenue streams. This is likely a test to see how consumers react, and the company will refine it over time. OpenAI needs to recoup its billions in funding, and an established way for a website to make money is by referring its users to other sites and taking a cut of whatever they buy. Theoretically, with all of ChatGPT's user data, OpenAI should be able to give you expert recommendations, and the strength of its own brand should make people comfortable adding to cart once Instant Checkout is integrated. If it can this right, OpenAI may be seeing dollar signs. Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

ChatGPT now offers a dedicated shopping assistant

The tool can help you compare products, find gifts and track down deals. With Black Friday around the corner, OpenAI is upgrading ChatGPT's shopping capabilities just in time to make spending your money even easier. Starting today, the company has begun rolling out shopping research, a new feature inside of ChatGPT designed to simplify the process of comparing different products. The tool is available to all ChatGPT users, including those with free accounts, with the company offering nearly unlimited usage through the holidays. As long as you're logged into your OpenAI account, you can try out the new experience by selecting "Shopping research" from the + menu. ChatGPT will also automatically route prompts it determines would be best served by the new model OpenAI has trained to answer commerce-related questions. For instance, if you type, "find the quietest cordless stick vacuum for a small apartment," ChatGPT will know what to do. In addition to comparative shopping, the new experience can help users track down deals, shop for gifts and even find lookalike products. For example, you can snap a photo of a dress and ask ChatGPT to find you something similar that costs less than $250. As you use the tool, ChatGPT will ask clarifying questions to help it narrow down its recommendations. For ChatGPT Pulse users, the tool will even be proactive, generating cards that offer personalized buying guides based on past conversations. The feature is powered by a variant of GPT-5 mini designed to excel specifically at shopping-related tasks. "We trained it to read trusted sites, cite reliable sources and synthesize information across many sources to produce high-quality product research," said OpenAI. In practice, the shopping assistant should be better at accurately citing product details relative to the company's other systems, including more powerful general-purpose models like GPT-5 Thinking. Still, OpenAI warns the tool isn't perfect. "Shopping research might make mistakes about product details like price and availability, and we encourage you to visit the merchant site for the most accurate details," the company said. Additionally, OpenAI notes the tool tends to do best in categories like electronics, beauty and home appliances where there are many details and specs the model can compare to generate comprehensive answers. It's no surprise to see OpenAI expand ChatGPT's shopping capabilities. The company already offers the option to buy items from Etsy from its chatbot, and competitors like Google have been aggressively adding AI shopping features in recent months.

Feeling Thoughtless This Holiday Season? ChatGPT Can Now Shop for You

If you have that one person on your list who is impossible to shop for, or you just don't feel like doing it, you can now farm the task out to ChatGPT. On Monday, OpenAI announced its new shopping research feature, which it claims can create a personalized buyer's guide based on your inputs. The feature is available in ChatGPT for users on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans. While ChatGPT's capabilities to sift through product descriptions and provide regurgitated recommendations from its training inputs aren't new, the company has introduced a new interface for the holiday season that will see the chatbot ask clarifying questions in a quiz-style interface. If you ask it for help finding a new TV, for instance, it'll ask you to provide some details about your budget, style, and the room where you're going to put it. It'll then serve you some offerings that you can reject or ask for more options. By the end, you should have a list of products that fit your specifications; unless the bot hallucinated some slop or otherwise screwed up. The new interface is supposed to pop up automatically if you ask a shopping-related question of ChatGPT's GPT-5 mini model, but users can also hop into the mode by selecting â€~shopping research’ from the (+) menu in the app or on desktop. For now, the mode will reportedly offer "organic" results that are pulled from publicly available retail sites. The company says ChatGPT will read "product pages directly, citing sources, and avoiding low-quality or spammy sites." A spokesperson for OpenAI said the company will not take a commission from sales "at this time." The shopping sector is one that AI companies certainly want to figure out how to monetize. Earlier this year, OpenAI announced a feature called Instant Checkout that allows users to make purchases from Etsy sellers without leaving the chat, and promised similar partnerships would be on the way with several Shopify merchants. The company has also been working with payment processor Stripe on a protocol for processing AI-driven transactions. Earlier this month, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said one of the company's paths forward to profitability will come from its presence in commerce, with plans to take a cut from both its role in the discovery process that drives users to a product and from a completed transaction. It's not that far of a step to sponsored listings, which surely aren't far off as the company looks to generate some revenue that'll counteract its extremely red balance sheet, which has over a trillion dollars in promised spending. Welcome to the future of commerce, it's not so different from the present.

ChatGPT adds AI shopping assistant to find the right products faster - 9to5Mac

Shopping research is already a popular use of AI. Now ChatGPT is adding a new tool that makes finding the right products even easier. The new shopping research feature comes after ChatGPT's recent support for buying products directly without leaving the app. Here's how it works, according to OpenAI: Instead of sifting through dozens of sites, you can just describe what you're looking for -- "Find the quietest cordless stick vacuum for a small apartment," "Help me choose between these three bikes," or "I need a gift for my four year old niece who loves art" -- and shopping research builds a thoughtful guide to help you decide. It asks smart clarifying questions, researches deeply across the internet, reviews quality sources, and builds on ChatGPT's understanding of you from past conversations and your ChatGPT memory to deliver a personalized buyer's guide in minutes. You can start shopping research in ChatGPT by either asking a shopping-related question or manually selecting shopping research from the + button. You can also tune results to what you're searching for with options to recommend more or less of specific recommendations. Shopping research with ChatGPT is available starting today through the iPhone and iPad app and on the web when signed in for Free, Go, Plus, and Pro accounts. No Mac app support for now, it seems. OpenAI says the feature will work with "nearly unlimited usage" through the holidays. It uses a GPT-5 mini model specifically trained on shopping prompts to work.

ChatGPT's new Shopping Research tool compares products for you - so you don't have to open 20 tabs

The tool creates personalized buyer's guides within ChatGPT OpenAI has decided to revamp the shopping experience in ChatGPT just before Black Friday by launching Shopping Research. Shopping Research is a new tool that enables ChatGPT to help you find great deals on products, and it's rolling out today on mobile and web for logged-in users on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans. One of the main problems with shopping using an AI chatbot is that they have never been good at verifying if a price is the lowest it's been, or understanding if a deal is actually good value. ChatGPT's Shopping Research aims to solve that problem. Even better, OpenAI is offering you almost unlimited access to Shopping Research throughout the holiday season. Using Shopping Research, you can simply describe what you're looking for using natural language, and ChatGPT will build an intelligent, personalized buyer's guide just for you. It's like it becomes your personal shopping assistant. So, you could type something like "Find me a unique frog-themed gift for someone who loves eclectic decor", or "Best TVs for a bright room", and ChatGPT will ask you if you'd like to launch Shopping Research and let it research that topic for you. The Shopping Research experience is a two-way conversation, with ChatGPT asking your smart clarifying questions and searching the Internet for up-to-date information that's delivered in minutes. OpenAI says that it performs particularly well for detail-heavy purchases like electronics, beauty, home and garden, kitchen & appliances, and sports & outdoor. Shopping Research in action. Video Credit: OpenAI Once all the clarifying questions have been answered, you'll get a customized buyer's guide that lists top products and shows key differences and tradeoffs. So, instead of having to have 20 tabs open for you to compare various products, you'll get it all in one easily accessible place. If you're a Pro user who is enjoying ChatGPT Pulse, the curated blast of information that ChatGPT sends you each day, you'll find that Shopping Research is now integrated into Pulse, where it can proactively suggest personalized buyers' guides based on your past conversations. To purchase something after identifying it in Shopping Research, you simply click through to the retailer's site rather than complete the purchase within ChatGPT. OpenAI says that it has plans for direct purchasing via Instant Checkout in the future.