ChatGPT Shopping vs. Google Shopping [Early Review]

ChatGPT has entered the eCommerce arena. The Shopping experience was previously quite incomplete within ChatGPT, with the latest update now providing product recommendations as part of its search experience.

One of my specialties is eCommerce SEO. I have extensive experience working for large stores on aspects such as Google’s free product listings, and have a great interest in the ChatGPT product recommendations update.

This article is an early review of ChatGPT’s product recommendations and how it stacks up against Google. The integration of product recommendations into ChatGPT is essentially their version of Google’s organic Shopping experience, providing a set of unpaid Shopping results after a prompt has been submitted.

ChatGPT has caught on considerably over the past couple of years. In 2025, the latest official data has ChatGPT receiving over a billion web searches in a week. To put this into perspective, Google receives around 96 billion per week (receiving almost 100X the amount of queries).

With this in mind, the ChatGPT Shopping experience will be just a drop in the ocean in terms of traffic to stores compared to Google Shopping, but it is still helpful to explore this recent development from OpenAI and how it compares based on the recent buzz.

When understanding how to rank within ChatGPT Shopping, we need to take the official documentation quite seriously, as I’m sure the product experience will evolve quickly and that there are specific criteria that needs to be met in order to appear in their version of free listings.

ChatGPT Shopping ranking factors include:

• Blocking of OAI-SearchBot: if the ChatGPT web crawler is blocked, your site won’t appear in the product recommendations module. Removing the block may require an alteration of the robots.txt file attached to your website.
• General factors: ChatGPT Shopping considers general factors such as price, customer ratings, ease of use, as well as specific criteria (such as size) when surfacing rich product results.
• Structured Metadata: the interpretation of this point from a standard SEO perspective is that this means Structured Metadata in the sense of schema.org. The reference doc doesn’t provide additional specifics on this point, however.
• 3rd Party Provider Rankings: it is made clear that the ranking of results is heavily pre-informed by data providers, rather than the system itself. Bing is heavily referenced within the documentation, so there is some connection there, along with additional integrations such as the recent Shopify rumours.

Outside of the information provided above, there isn’t a great deal to go off. The above is quite a simple set of ranking criteria, but it doesn’t provide any strategic focus at this point that an online store could necessarily specifically optimise for within ChatGPT Shopping that wouldn’t work for Google.

When it comes to the free listings space, Google Shopping is the equivalent competing product, being the most popular global platform used by shoppers. Here’s what a result comparison looks like for the query: “best red bed sheets for king bed under $200“:

There are some important points worth highlighting within the query comparison:

1. Product Similarity: for the most part, the products weren’t overly similar to the different types of free listing results that appear on page 1 of Google. The comparison, however, shows an equivalent product comparison that appears prominently on both search experiences.
2. Product Naming & Ratings: interestingly, the product naming is very similar to Google. With the same titles of products appearing on each surface. On Google, the system that generates these titles is heavily dependent on product feeds in Google Merchant Center Next, along with the Shopping Graph (which can provide some slight modifications), so it is very interesting that there is an exact match here, likely pointing to a trail of connection to the datasets that Google uses. It is also worth noting that the accumulated product ratings are the same (both showing 4.5 rating out of 779 reviews). This again makes me think that ChatGPT may just be accessing Google’s dataset here, considering this will be a specific set of product-feed specific products that have eligible ratings, which should be slightly different if they were using independent datasets.
3. Website Selection: the PDPs (Product Detail Pages) from websites have some similarity with the suggestions provided by Google. For instance, the Macy’s product suggestion in the comparison is quite similar to Google, with some minor differences.
4. Query Match: the query match for ChatGPT, in terms of ensuring only relevant products are shown, needs a lot of improvement. The search query in the example explicitly mentions “king” as the size, yet ChatGPT is surfacing “california king” for the entire merchant panel result. You can see in the Google comparison that they have the preset filters in place for “Bed Size: King”, which will only show products that meet that specific criterion.

Overall, the experience isn’t drastically different from Google’s own Shopping experience, but the product dataset is far more limited on ChatGPT. Every time I did the same search on ChatGPT in a different window, the product recommendations were almost completely different, too, which doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence when trying to locate the “best” product. There were also a set of additional issues that I noticed when testing out that are worth highlighting.

There is a set of issues that ChatGPT will need to resolve for the product recommendations experience to be truly useful to users. Some notes that I took while testing out ChatGPT’s Shopping integration include the following:

• Image Resolution: while doing my testing, I regularly encountered product images that displayed as very low resolution, which looked much better on the retailer’s website. This isn’t an issue that Google Shopping has due to the direct access to the supplied feeds that are maintained by stores, being a core issue that ChatGPT Shopping will likely have difficulty in being competitive without this direct integration.

• Mobile experience: based on my testing, I was unable to get the same desktop Shopping experience on mobile. Product recommendations are provided, but no merchant panel experience appears, with the experience instead just directing users to a PLP (Product Listing Pages) on the website.
• Unable to explore sources: with the results within free listings on Google, there is a greater level of transparency around how the results appear in the positions that they do. For instance, I can explore the exact list of reviews that support the rating for a product on Google free listings. On ChatGPT Shopping, we’re essentially taking their word for it without any source link or direct reference, which is unlikely to fare well with shoppers.
• ‘Buy’ call-to-action: within ChatGPT, the CTA for purchasing the products is ‘Buy’, which takes you to the PDP. On Google, when the ‘Buy’ CTA is commonly used, it will take you directly to the checkout if that specific add-on is enabled in GMC Next. This is rumoured to be something that ChatGPT is working on with Shopify, but doesn’t currently deliver on the expected experience.

Based on the current ChatGPT Shopping experience, it still has a long way to go to be truly useful for customers. It is still very early days, so it will be interesting to see the ChatGPT referrer traffic showing in GA4 when traffic is being directed at product pages. For the moment, large eCommerce stores that I have access to GA4 have barely any clicks at all that are directed at PDPs from ChatGPT Shopping free listing results.

I’ll be watching closely to see developments within this area and will update this article as more information is released by OpenAI on how Shopping results are generated and if there are any key points of difference to Google that I think would be considered as useful to shoppers. For the moment, it appears that ChatGPT will have an uphill battle with this Shopping product to be truly competitive with Google, or even be perceived as an alternate discovery route.

Since writing this review of ChatGPT Shopping, Google has announced the release of its shoppable product options functionality in AI Mode. This is essentially Google’s direct match competing offering to ChatGPT shopping, and I’m impressed with the speed and implementation of this release. Here is an early review that touches on many of the points highlighted in this article, with the comparison being to AI Mode rather than Google’s free listings more generally.

Google has shown once again why they are unbeatable when it comes to Shopping, releasing their competing product to ChatGPT a few days later.

The release of Google’s product recommendations in AI Mode is here, and I’m quite impressed by the experience so far after testing out… pic.twitter.com/pZ9N6HSpii

— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) May 8, 2025