OpenAI has launched a new feature called shopping research that’s meant to help people figure out what to buy without digging through dozens of websites themselves. The tool asks you what you’re looking for, checks reliable sources across the internet, and builds a personalized buying guide in a few minutes.
The feature is now available on mobile and the web for all logged-in ChatGPT users, including those on the Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans. To help with holiday shopping, OpenAI says it’s offering “nearly unlimited usage” through the season. We’re seeing it live in Canada right now and this tool comes just ahead of Black Friday this week.
The idea is to make product discovery feel more like a conversation. You can describe what you need and the tool follows up with clarifying questions about budget, features, and who it’s for. If you use ChatGPT’s memory, the tool can personalize suggestions even more based on previous chats. It’s cool as you can just answer the questions from prompts and visually see what the tool suggests.
Once you start, ChatGPT opens a visual interface that shows products as it finds them. You can react in real time—marking items as “Not interested” or asking for “More like this”—and the recommendations adjust as you go.
After gathering enough info, the tool delivers a full buyer’s guide with top picks, trade-offs, differences, pricing, and availability pulled from trusted retail sources. You still complete the purchase on the retailer’s website, but OpenAI says direct checkout inside ChatGPT will come later for supported merchants.
OpenAI says the tool is designed for areas where product details matter, such as electronics, beauty, home and garden, appliances, and sports gear. For quick questions, like checking a price, regular ChatGPT responses still work.
The company is also bringing shopping research into ChatGPT Pulse, a feature for Pro users. Pulse can suggest guides proactively when it notices patterns in your conversations. For example, if you’ve been talking a lot about e-bikes, it might surface accessories you might want.
ChatGPT will suggest using shopping research when it detects a shopping question. You can also choose it manually from the “+” menu.
So how the heck does this new tool work? The system runs on a version of GPT-5 mini that’s been trained specifically for shopping. OpenAI says the model was trained to read trusted retail sites, cite sources, match product specs to user requirements, and update recommendations based on feedback. The company also shared internal testing results showing that shopping research produced more accurate product recommendations than standard ChatGPT search tools.
OpenAI says chats used for shopping aren’t shared with retailers, and results are based on publicly available product pages, with an allowlisting process available for merchants who want to ensure visibility.
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