How to Prepare Your Website for ChatGPT’s Shopping Results

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With the release of ChatGPT’s shopping feature, there’s an exciting new way for users to find and purchase products or services. If you sell products, provide bookings or manage events, you now have a great opportunity to be surfaced directly inside ChatGPT’s responses when a user indicates a purchase intent. In this guide, we will walk you through how to prepare your site.

What is ChatGPT Shopping?

ChatGPT Shopping is a new feature of GPT-4o that surfaces products or services (event tickets, clothing, restaurants) directly within the ChatGPT conversation. When users ask questions such as:

  • “What are the best deals on headphones?”
  • “Buy tickets for concerts in LA”
  • “Where can I book a massage this weekend?”

ChatGPT will return a carousel of results comprising product names, images, pricing, and direct links to complete a purchase — without having the user search online.

How does ChatGPT source shopping results?

Currently, ChatGPT uses three potential methods for this:

  1. Web Crawling: ChatGPT has its own bot, OAI-SearchBot, that can index publicly available websites.
  2. Structured Data (Schema Markup): ChatGPT can pull information (name, price, availability, URL) directly from Schema.org markup.
  3. Merchant Feeds (Coming Soon): A program for companies to submit structured product feeds.

This means any website can potentially be eligible, if they take a few steps.

1. Allow OpenAI’s Crawler

Make sure you are not blocking the crawler on your website.

✅ What You Can Do

  • Look at your robots.txt
  • Make sure it does not contain:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Preferably, allow the bot like this:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

Allow crawling and indexing of your pages.

2. Create Structured Data (Schema.org)

Structured data allows ChatGPT to understand your content. The schema type should be correct if you are promoting products, providing services, or advertising events.

Products:

Use Product and Offer.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "Bluetooth Headphones",
  "image": "https://example.com/image.jpg",
  "description": "Noise cancelling Bluetooth headphones.",
  "sku": "12345",
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "priceCurrency": "USD",
    "price": "79.99",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
    "url": "https://example.com/product-page"
  }
}

Events:

Use Event and Offer for tickets.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Event",
  "name": "Live Concert",
  "startDate": "2025-06-15T20:00",
  "location": {
    "@type": "Place",
    "name": "City Arena",
    "address": "123 Main St, New York, NY"
  },
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "price": "25",
    "priceCurrency": "USD",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
    "url": "https://example.com/buy-tickets"
  }
}

Every product, service, and event must have its own unique URL with valid structured data.

3. Optimize Page Content for Intent-Based Queries

ChatGPT responds to natural language questions. Make sure your content answers them directly:

  • Use headers like: “Best Running Shoes for Beginners” or “How to Book Yoga Classes This Weekend”
  • Add FAQs and conversational content that matches how people talk

This increases your chances of appearing when users ask real-life questions.

4. Set Up Analytics to Monitor ChatGPT Referrals

When ChatGPT surfaces your content, it often includes this UTM parameter:

utm_source=chatgpt.com

Track this source in your analytics tools (Google Analytics, Plausible, etc.) to measure performance.

5. Join OpenAI’s Merchant Interest List (Optional, but Recommended)

OpenAI is building a product feed integration for merchants to submit catalogs directly.

👉 Join the waitlist here or via the OpenAI help center.

This gives your content a direct pipeline into ChatGPT results — similar to how Google Merchant Center works.

6. (Optional) Build a Plugin for Deeper Integration

For advanced use cases, OpenAI allows you to build ChatGPT Plugins so users can:

  • Search your products from inside ChatGPT
  • Generate checkout URLs
  • Book or purchase directly

Requirements include:

  • A public OpenAPI spec
  • Authentication (OAuth or API Key)
  • REST endpoints to search, view details, and link to your site

TL;DR Checklist

Step Action
✅ Robots.txt Allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl your site
✅ Structured Data Add Schema.org markup (Product, Event, Offer) into all essential pages
✅ Content Optimization Answer real user questions with SEO-friendly headers and content
✅ Track ChatGPT Traffic Look out for utm_source=chatgpt.com in your analytics
✅ Join feed program Sign up for OpenAI’s merchant data feed (coming soon)
✅ Plugin (Advanced) Build a plugin if you want deep integration and live ChatGPT queries

Closing Thoughts

ChatGPT is becoming a discovery engine for shopping, events, services — even bookings. Now it’s time to be in front of users when they are making decisions, not just searching.

By allowing access, creating structured data, and optimizing your content, any website can appear in ChatGPT shopping results — no ads, no pay-to-play.

If you’re ready to future-proof your visibility, start by checking your schema and robots.txt. Then, follow OpenAI’s announcements for merchant tools and integrations.