OpenAI has enhanced ChatGPT’s search capabilities to provide users with product recommendations when they make shopping-related inquiries. According to OpenAI’s official blog post, this new feature offers item suggestions complete with specifications and purchase links in response to queries that indicate shopping intent. Examples of such queries include “best birthday gifts for teens” or “durable luggage for travel”.
The system generates these recommendations independently by analyzing product information from across the web, including pricing, product descriptions, and customer reviews. OpenAI emphasizes that these results are not advertisements, and the company does not receive any compensation for purchases made through the platform.
For a website to appear in these search results, it must allow access to OpenAI’s web crawler, OAI-SearchBot, through its site permissions. The crawler functions similarly to those used by conventional search engines, and website owners can monitor traffic originating from ChatGPT using standard analytics tools.
This update is powered by GPT-4o, OpenAI’s current AI model, and covers various product categories including electronics, home goods, and apparel. The feature is now available to both logged-in and guest users across all subscription tiers, whether free or paid.
The introduction of this feature comes as ChatGPT’s search functionality has processed over one billion web searches in the past week, demonstrating growing user interest in ChatGPT’s search capabilities since their introduction last year, as reported by Reuters. OpenAI’s technical documentation confirms that the web crawler is used exclusively for search functionality and not for training the company’s AI models.
