OpenAI has announced a major update to Chatgpt’s web search capabilities promising to enhance the online shopping experience with personalised product recommendations.
Users worldwide, including those on Pro, Plus, and Free tiers, as well as those accessing Chatgpt without logging in, can now receive tailored suggestions complete with images, reviews, and direct purchase links.
The upgrade, available through OpenAI’s default GPT-4o model, allows users to ask specific product-related questions and receive curated results across categories like fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics. Importantly, the company emphasised that the results will be free of advertisements and that OpenAI will not collect commissions from purchases made through the platform.
Shopping results will be independently determined using structured metadata from third-party sources, including pricing information, product descriptions, and customer reviews.
In a demo for WIRED, Adam Fry, ChatGPT search product lead at OpenAI, demonstrated the features of the new upgrade and highlighted that the results in OpenAI searches are not paid placements, but rather organic results. “They are not ads,” says Fry. “They are not sponsored.”
“It’s not looking for specific signals that are in some algorithm,” said Fry. “It’s trying to understand how people are reviewing this, how people are talking about this, what the pros and cons are”.
The move signals OpenAI’s deeper push into the search space, directly challenging Google’s dominance with a user-first approach that steers away from the ad-heavy experiences ofter associated with the traditional search engine format.
The announcement follows a sharp rise in ChatGPT’s popularity, with OpenAI reporting over 1 billion web searches in the past week and more than 400 million weekly active users as of February.
