ChatGPT’s search functionality has been upgraded to provide an improved and personalised online shopping experience for users, OpenAI announced on Monday, April 28.
When users look for products online using the Search feature in ChatGPT, the chatbot will now provide images of products as well as details such as pricing and reviews. The search results will also include direct links to websites where they can buy those products.
These shopping-related upgrades are available to all users, including ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers, free users, and even those without an account. Initially, the AI-powered search results will focus on products in fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics.
The latest search update to ChatGPT is part of OpenAI’s efforts to compete with Google in using AI to simplify how users discover products and information online. It comes at a time when the Alphabet-owned company has been found guilty by a US federal court of having an illegal monopoly in the online advertising market.
However, OpenAI clarified that ads will not be part of the product-related search results thrown up by ChatGPT.
Instead, the shopping results will be shown to users based on structured metadata from third parties, such as pricing, product descriptions, and reviews. Since paid users have access to a memory-integrated version of the chatbot, ChatGPT will reference their chat history in order to provide highly personalised product recommendations.
“This [memory upgrade] will be available to all Plus and Pro users except for those in the EEA, UK, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein,” OpenAI said.
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OpenAI also said it will not be taking a cut from any purchases of products discovered through ChatGPT Search. “Commerce in ChatGPT is still early, and we’ll continue to bring merchants along our journey as we quickly learn and iterate,” the company added.
‘One billion searches in one week’
On Monday, OpenAI revealed that ChatGPT Search was used one billion times to search the web last week.
Besides the shopping update, ChatGPT Search will also show trending search topics to users when they start typing into the search bar. In addition, ChatGPT Search can now be accessed via WhatsApp. Portions of the AI-generated search summaries will now be highlighted to indicate the corresponding citation provided by the chatbot.
The Microsoft-backed AI startup has previously experimented with shopping features on its AI agent-driven Operator platform. This platform allows users to deploy AI agents capable of autonomously browsing dozens of web pages to find relevant products.
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