ChatGPT Shopping Research Drops In Time For Black Friday With Nearly Unlimited Usage

In late September, OpenAI unveiled a new Instant Checkout feature for ChatGPT that lets users shop for certain products without leaving the chat app, as long as merchants support it. On Monday, OpenAI continued its push into shopping by launching a new ChatGPT feature that users might want to take advantage of right away, considering we're just a few days away from the big Black Friday event. Called Shopping Research, the new ChatGPT feature will do what the name implies: perform research online to help you find the right deal for you. 

ChatGPT users will be able to use natural language to perform specific shopping searches. OpenAI offered the following examples to give users an idea of what's possible with Shopping Research: "Find the quietest cordless stick vacuum for a small apartment," "Help me choose between these three bikes," or "I need a gift for my four-year-old niece who loves art." These are broad searches that don't include any specific keywords, like a product brand or company name. Shopping Research will build a "thoughtful guide," according to OpenAI. Shopping Research can ask questions to understand what you need before researching the web and looking at reviews. The new mode will also look at ChatGPT memory to personalize the experience.

Shopping Research will be rolling out to users starting Monday. It'll be available to ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans, with OpenAI saying it'll offer users "nearly unlimited usage" through the holidays on all plans.

OpenAI said in a blog post that hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT to "find, understand, and compare products." That's apparently why they made Shopping Research. The new AI model "turns product discovery into a conversation: asking smart questions to understand what you care about, pulling accurate, up-to-date details from high-quality sources, and bringing options back to you to refine the results." To start using Shopping Research, you can either pick the new option from the "+" menu in the composer or select Shopping Research when ChatGPT suggests it automatically based on your search.

OpenAI

Once you've selected the model, ChatGPT will open up a new visual interface where you can interact with the products the AI displays. The visual experience was created for Shopping Research. ChatGPT will browse the web for up-to-date information in the background, but users can continue guiding the research by interacting with products. You can mark items as "Not interested" or "More like this," to refine the internet searches in real time. After a few minutes, Shopping Research will deliver a personalized guide featuring "top products, key differences, tradeoffs, and up-to-date information from reliable retailers." OpenAI says it's a "clear summary" that would otherwise take a lot of comparing and reading to perform on your own. Shopping Research will also be available in ChatGPT Pulse, where it might suggest personalized shopping guides proactively.

Users can click on links to purchase shortlisted items, but the shopping action will happen on the retailer's website. In the future, Shopping Research will work with Instant Checkout for supported merchants. OpenAI notes that it trained a GPT-5 mini version with reinforcement learning specifically for the feature. OpenAI trained the AI to look at trusted sites and cite reliable sources when producing "high-quality product research." Shopping Research "performs especially well in detail-heavy categories like electronics, beauty, home and garden, kitchen and appliances, and sports and outdoor," the company says.

Also, the new Shopping Research feature should perform better than asking ChatGPT for shopping information via the regular GPT-5 Thinking models or ChatGPT Search. That's according to benchmark scores the company offered. Even so, ChatGPT might make mistakes while in Shopping Research mode. You'll want to double-check the information with retailers.

OpenAI

OpenAI also explains that chat data is not shared with retailers. The results are "organic and based on publicly available retail sites." Retailers who want to ensure they will appear in Shopping Research results in ChatGPT can do so via an enrollment process.