Ask ChatGPT to recommend a pair of hiking boots or a cordless vacuum, and it will now show product cards with a photo, a price and a link to the retailer. Until the summer of 2026, those cards mostly came from web search results pulled at the moment you asked. A Profound study published on September 3, 2026 shows that since July 10, most products recommended in the shopping prompts its customers track come from feeds that merchants send directly to OpenAI.
This already matters well beyond the US. In France, for example, an Odoxa survey presented by the e-commerce federation Fevad on February 11, 2026 found that 31% of online shoppers use generative AI when they buy online. Yet direct feeds to ChatGPT are not open in Europe, which gives merchants time to get ready, although nobody knows how much.
This article covers what the study measured and what it does not prove, then the situation for merchants outside the US. It closes with the catalog work you can start now.
Key takeaways
- In Profound's data, ChatGPT Shopping has relied mainly on merchant feeds rather than web search since the summer of 2026.
- In the days that followed, recommendations concentrated on fewer merchants.
- OpenAI's standard feed process does not cover Europe yet, and in-chat checkout requires a separately enabled integration for eligible merchants.
- For merchants in markets like France, the products ChatGPT shows still appear to come largely from Google Shopping's free listings.
- A clean catalog, consistent across your Google feed, your product pages and your structured data, prepares you for both scenarios.
What Profound saw on July 10, 2026
In a single day, the share of recommended products coming from a merchant feed rose more than sevenfold in Profound's data. The company looked into it after customers reported sharp swings in their ChatGPT visibility in mid-July.
The study, written by Profound AI strategist Allen Wu, draws on the shopping prompts its customers track daily in ChatGPT. The July 2026 daily sample covers 1,757,723 prompt runs. Within it, the share of feed-sourced products jumped from 8.26% to 61.54% on July 10.
The impact on tracked merchants was fast and uneven. Profound looked at 687 customers that had at least one product showing up every day. Of those, 450 lost at least a third of their visibility between July 7–9 and July 10–12, while only 67 gained by the same margin. The table below shows the concentration metrics published in the study.
| Metric measured by Profound | July 7–9, 2026 | July 10–12, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Share of recommendations held by the top 10 merchants | 22.5% | 41.8% |
| Number of distinct merchants referenced | 13,524 | 10,607 |
The author also built a statistical model on the 517 merchants whose visibility moved sharply. According to the study, lost web-search presence and gained feed presence together account for 83% of those swings in the model. Profound also estimates that about 35% of feed-sourced products in July were tied to Shopify.
Three caveats apply. The data comes from prompts tracked by one vendor's customers, not from real shopper behavior. The study does not say which country those prompts came from, although the standard direct-feed process currently targets the US market. It is also observational, which the author acknowledges by describing it as a snapshot in time.
Why did feeds take over?
OpenAI has not publicly commented on the shift so far. Profound links it to the GPT-5.6 release the day before, on July 9, 2026, arguing that no other event on that date could explain a swing of that size.
One plausible explanation lies in what a shopping recommendation needs. A web search result can show an outdated price or an item that is out of stock, while a feed kept current by the merchant should carry accurate prices and inventory. OpenAI's product feed spec asks merchants to update prices and availability as soon as they change. An assistant that wants to avoid recommending something nobody can buy has good reason to favor that source.
OpenAI also stresses the line between recommendations and advertising. Its help center article on shopping in ChatGPT states that product results are selected independently and are not influenced by any partnership. The same page says Shopify merchants' catalogs reach ChatGPT without any action on their part, and that other merchants can apply for direct feed access.
That setup may partly explain the concentration Profound observed. Large retailers have teams that can build a complete feed, and Shopify stores get syndicated automatically. Merchants in neither group still depend on web search, a source that has carried far less weight in Profound's data since July. The author's advice is for big brands to integrate their own feed and for smaller merchants to go through Shopify.
Direct feeds aren't open to European merchants yet
OpenAI's documentation, as of October 2026, says the standard feed upload targets the US. It does not say whether a merchant based outside the US can use it to sell to US shoppers, which is something to confirm with OpenAI directly.
The spec mentions a shared format that already includes codes for Canada and Mexico. OpenAI says additional markets should only be used once it has confirmed the integration and the countries and currencies allowed. There is no published timeline for Europe, and guessing a launch date would be speculation.
Feeds, which get your products discovered, are separate from checkout inside ChatGPT. OpenAI's current help page, checked on October 27, 2026, still describes Instant Checkout, which lets shoppers pay without leaving ChatGPT, for some eligible products and merchants. The feed specification requires checkout to be separately enabled for the integration. Forrester's March 7, 2026 analysis described a retreat at that time; it does not establish that checkout has now been discontinued everywhere. Merchants should confirm eligibility and provide a path to their own site when this option is unavailable.
Advertising is on a different track. ChatGPT ads have been open in France and much of Europe since August 2026, as we covered in our piece on what ChatGPT ads change in Europe. OpenAI also accepts product catalogs in its ad platform, Ads Manager, but its documentation only describes using them to create ads. A European merchant can therefore pay to appear in ChatGPT, but cannot yet feed its catalog into the free recommendations directly.
Where do products shown to European shoppers come from?
Without direct feeds, ChatGPT has to find products elsewhere, and the best-documented route leads to Google Shopping. That evidence predates the July shift, so it calls for some caution.
In March 2026, Peec AI researcher Tom Wells published an analysis in Search Engine Land covering about 5,000 product carousels shown by ChatGPT. The team compared the 43,000 products in those carousels against the top 40 free results on Google Shopping and Bing Shopping for the same searches. According to the study, 83% of products were a strong match for a Google Shopping result. The same match rate reached only 11% for Bing Shopping.
Position in Google Shopping also seems to matter. The same analysis found that 60% of strong matches came from Google Shopping's top ten results. The authors excluded paid ads, so only free listings were counted.
The study has its limits. It relies on similarity between product titles, although the researchers also found Google Shopping identifiers in a hidden field of ChatGPT's responses. It does not state which country the searches came from, and it was run before July 10, 2026. Still, it seems reasonable to assume that in markets without direct feeds, ChatGPT keeps leaning on these search results. We treat this as a working hypothesis that only regular tracking of your own queries can confirm.
Getting your catalog ready now
The useful work is the same whether ChatGPT reads your pages, queries Google Shopping or one day ingests your feed. It all comes down to the quality and consistency of the data describing your products.
Start with Google Merchant Center, the free service that powers Google Shopping's unpaid listings. If your catalog isn't there, it is probably the most direct source of ChatGPT shopping visibility available to you in Europe today. If you already use it for ads, check that free listings are switched on and that your titles describe products the way a customer would search for them.
Next, look at the product pages themselves. Product and Offer structured data lets a crawler read an item's name, brand, price and availability without ambiguity. That information should match your Google feed, because a price or stock mismatch between two sources can lead an engine to drop the product. Also check that your robots.txt does not block AI crawlers, including OAI-SearchBot, the one OpenAI uses for search.
Finally, prepare for direct feeds. OpenAI's spec requires nine basic fields, which a standard catalog export usually already contains. The table below maps them to data you most likely manage today.
| Field required by OpenAI | Usual equivalent in your catalog | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| item_id | SKU or product reference | Keep the ID stable over time |
| title | Product name | Describe the product, skip slogans |
| description | Long description | Clean text, no markup or promotional copy |
| url | Product page URL | Absolute URL, HTTPS preferred |
| brand | Brand | Same spelling across every source |
| seller_name | Store name | Same name as on your site |
| image_url | Main image | Sharp image, no overlaid text |
| price | Selling price | Decimal amount plus ISO currency code, e.g. 79.99 EUR, kept current |
| availability | Stock status | Updated as soon as an item sells out |
Shopify stores are a special case, since the platform already passes their catalog to ChatGPT, according to OpenAI. Shopify says a store based outside the US can qualify as long as it sells to US customers, accepts the channel's supplemental terms and publishes its store policies. Nothing yet indicates that this relay reaches shoppers in Europe. It is worth watching Shopify's announcements on extending it to Europe, because access may well arrive through the platform before the direct process opens.
Tracking your presence in shopping answers
Only regular measurement will tell you whether your products appear, and which competitors show up instead. Study figures describe a broad trend, not the state of your own catalog.
The simplest method is to write around twenty buying questions close to what your customers ask, then run them in ChatGPT every week. For each question, record the products shown, the merchants selling them and whether yours appear. A fixed list lets you spot a sudden drop like the one Profound's customers saw in July. Our citation tracking keeps citation records by engine; it does not replace a dedicated check of product cards and merchant placement in Shopping carousels.
Showing up in the carousel does not guarantee that ChatGPT recommends your product over a competitor's. We explored that gap in our article on being cited by AI but not recommended. The resulting visits then land in your analytics, provided you know how to isolate them, which our guide to AI traffic hidden in Google Analytics explains.
Our recommendation
For a European merchant, the priority this fall is not chasing access to OpenAI's feed program, which does not exist yet for your market. It is making your catalog flawless in the sources ChatGPT appears to rely on today, starting with Google Shopping's free listings and the structured data on your product pages. That work will still pay off when direct feeds open, since the same fields should be required.
We also recommend setting up your panel of buying questions now and keeping its history. The July episode in Profound's data shows that a change of source can reshuffle visibility in a single day. A merchant with a baseline in hand will be able to see the effect when feeds open in Europe, then decide whether a direct feed is worth the investment.
Frequently asked questions
What is a ChatGPT product feed?
It is a file that lists your catalog line by line and that you send directly to OpenAI. OpenAI's published spec requires nine basic fields, including the product ID, title, description, page URL, brand, image, price and availability. The delivery guide prefers Parquet and also supports compressed JSONL, CSV and TSV files over SFTP, with a full catalog snapshot at least daily. These are standard data formats that whoever manages your catalog exports will be able to produce.
Can a European merchant send a product feed to ChatGPT today?
Not through the standard process, which targets the United States according to OpenAI's documentation as of October 2026. The shared format also includes codes for Canada and Mexico, but OpenAI says other markets only open once it has explicitly confirmed them. According to OpenAI, Shopify stores go through an automatic relay, which Shopify also opens to stores based outside the US as long as they sell to US customers. Nothing yet suggests it reaches shoppers in Europe.
Are the products ChatGPT recommends ads?
No, according to OpenAI, whose help center says product results are selected independently and are not influenced by any partnership. Ads run separately, in clearly distinct placements, and they have been available in France and much of Europe since August 2026. A catalog uploaded to OpenAI's ad platform is used to create ads, and its documentation describes no role for it in free recommendations.
Do I need Google Merchant Center to show up in ChatGPT Shopping?
Nothing officially requires it. However, a Peec AI study published in March 2026 found that the vast majority of products shown by ChatGPT closely matched Google Shopping's free listings, which are powered by Merchant Center. Until direct feeds open in your market, this free account remains the simplest way to be present in that source.
How can I check whether my products already appear in ChatGPT?
Ask ChatGPT the buying questions your customers ask, on a regular schedule, and record the products and merchants it shows. A fixed panel of around twenty questions, repeated every week, gives you a comparison point, not a guarantee of stable answers. You can then spot the resulting visits in your analytics through the tracking parameter ChatGPT adds to its outbound links.
