How to Make Your Products Appear in ChatGPT with OpenAI Merchants
Lots of users now use answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI mode as their primary search engine. This shift is changing how product discovery happens online and it opens a new opportunity for merchants to surface their products directly inside AI-driven responses.
Sign Up to OpenAI Merchants
OpenAI has launched an initiative for merchants to directly update their product information through a data feed API. While the details are still being worked out and this is currently a closed beta, you can already sign up to join the waitlist and learn more about the Product Discovery Program: https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/
Technical SEO with Schema.org
Historically, Google used JSON-LD formatting schemas within pages to build rich product previews with reviews, price, and images.
While OpenAI has not publicly stated anything on the topic, they’ve also started displaying rich product previews in ChatGPT even before launching their Product Discovery initiative. We strongly believe they rely on existing web standards like Schema.org. So we recommend that you implement product schemas in your product pages, so that when OpenAI crawlers pass through your content, they can find those schemas and serve them to the user in a rich product preview.
This approach can be coupled with OpenAI Product Discovery and has the added benefit that it’s platform-agnostic which means that it will work regardless of the AI search engine that crawls your website.
It also helps future-proof your website’s visibility by ensuring that your content is readable and understandable by both human users and AI systems alike.
On a broader note, we highly recommend website owners invest time into getting their technical SEO done right. We believe that technical SEO has never mattered as much as now because it is a great way to optimize for AI agents visiting your website by tailoring to their behavior and thus helping them to serve the right information to the user.
In short: structured data is your bridge between your product and the AI models trying to recommend it.