Openai announced today that users will soon be able to purchase products through Chatgpt. Regardless of whether they are signature users, the launch of shopping buttons for AI-powered search queries will be provided to everyone. Shoppers will not be able to check out inside Chatgpt; instead, they will be redirected to the merchant's website to complete the transaction.

In a pre-launch demonstration of Wired by Adam Fry, head of searching for products at Openai, it demonstrates how to use the updated user experience to help people using the tool for product research decide which espresso machine or office chair to buy. Product advice provided to potential shoppers is based on what Chatgpt remembers about user preferences and product reviews extracted from the web.

Fry said ChatGpt users have already conducted a billion web searches per week, and people are using the tool to study a wide range of shopping categories such as beauty, home supplies and electronics. This product leads to Chatgpt for Best Office Chats, one of Wired's rigorously tested and widely read purchasing guides, which include links to our reports in the Sources tab. (Although the business side of Wired's parent company Conde Nast signed a license agreement with OpenAI last year so the company could surface our content, the editorial team retained independence in the way we covered the startup.

The new user experience of buying things in Chatgpt has many similarities with Google Shopping. In both interfaces, when you click on the image of the budget office chair, multiple retailers are listed on the right side of the screen, such as Amazon and Walmart, with buttons for completing the purchase. Currently, there is a major difference between shopping via Chatgpt and Google: The results you see in OpenAI searches are not paid locations, but organic results. “They are not advertisements,” Fry said. “They don’t have sponsorship.”

While some of the product recommendations that appear inside Google Shopping are because retailers pay them for it, this is just a mechanism Google uses to decide which products to list in a shopping search. Websites that post product reviews constantly adjust the content of their purchase suggestions to convince opaque Google algorithms, which includes high-quality reviews of products that have been thoroughly tested. Google favors comments that have more considerations in search results and ranks them high when users research products. Taking one of the best places in Google search can lead to more users purchasing the product through the site, potentially earning publishers millions of dollars in membership revenue.

So, how do Chatgpt choose which products to recommend? Why are these specific espresso machines and office chairs listed first when the user enters a prompt?

"It's not looking for a specific signal in some kind of algorithm," Fry said. According to him, it would be a more personal and conversational shopping experience rather than a keyword-focused one. "It's trying to understand how people review this, how people talk about this, what are the pros and cons," Fry said. If you say you only like buying black clothes from a specific retailer, Chatgpt will store that information in its memory the next time you ask for a suggestion of which shirt to buy, which gives you advice that matches your taste.