This year, a new player has entered the ecommerce shopping space. ChatGPT, one of the largest AI tools on the market, has recently added product results to its capabilities.
*ChatGPT product result example sourced from openai.com
If you shop on Google, Amazon, or Bing you are probably familiar with the format of the results highlighting brands, pricing, and reviews. What makes ChatGPT’s offering different is the ability to search for and refine results through conversational queries. The results are based on user preferences ChatGPT remembers about shoppers as well as product reviews pulled from across the web. Adam Fry, ChatGPT search product lead at OpenAI, said in an interview with Wired.com that ChatGPT users are already running over a billion web searches per week, and that people are using the tool to research a wide breadth of shopping categories, like beauty, home goods, and electronics. Adoption of AI tools for shopping is also on the rise. E-Marketer.com has reported that nearly a quarter of consumers have used genAI while shopping, while 35% of consumers plan on using genAI when shopping in the future.
*adoption rates of GenAI in shopping from E-Marketer.com
These product results are still fairly new to the market and do not feature any paid placements. This means that advertisers that optimize for these placements organically have the best chance to show up for these new results. Below are some of our best practices to help clients populate their products in ChatGPT:
Ensure you haven’t opted out of OpenAI’s search crawler - OpenAI uses a web crawler named OAI-SearchBot to find, access, and surface information in ChatGPT. Website owners should review their robots.txt file to ensure OAI-SearchBot has access to crawl their pages.
Update product detail pages - Having proper titles, descriptions, and schema on product pages, that is clear and detailed, will help give valuable information for OpenAI’s crawlers to review.
Use IndexNow to help update product data in real time - Using IndexNow helps send real-time data to search engines including structured product data.
Optimize Google & Microsoft Merchant Centers - ChatGPT will not only crawl your website, but other websites as well to understand your brand & products. We have seen direct correlations between Merchant Center data and the data populating in ChatGPT. Not to mention that ChatGPT is also a direct partner with Microsoft.
Sign up to be notified when feed submissions open - While not yet available OpenAI is thinking ahead with the opportunity to provide brands a way to upload their product data through feeds. We recommend signing up to have early access to this feature.
As more of these features are rolled out and users adopt ChatGPT in their decision making process, referral traffic to websites will most likely increase. In order to track this traffic OpenAI automatically includes the UTM parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com which can be tracked in tools like GA4.
For more news and information about the future of AI shopping opportunities be sure to stay tuned to the Revel blog! If you have any questions about if your product pages are fully optimized for AI shopping results or if you would like an audit of your shopping feed feel free to reach out to our team here.
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