The new user experience of buying stuff inside of ChatGPT shares many similarities to Google Shopping. In the interfaces of both, when you click on the image of a budget office chair that tickles your fancy, multiple retailers, like Amazon and Walmart, are listed on the right side of the screen, with buttons for completing the purchase. There is one major difference between shopping through ChatGPT versus Google, for now: The results you see in OpenAI searches are not paid placements, but organic results. “They are not ads,” says Fry. “They are not sponsored.”
While some product recommendations that appear inside of Google Shopping show up because retailers paid for them to be there, that’s just one mechanism Google uses to decide which products to list in Shopping searches. Websites that publish product reviews are constantly tweaking the content of their buying recommendations in an effort to convince the opaque Google algorithm that the website includes high-quality reviews of products that have been thoroughly tested by real humans. Google favors those more considered reviews in search results and will rank them highly when a user is researching a product. To land one of the top spots in a Google search can lead to more of those users buying the product through the website, potentially earning the publisher millions of dollars in affiliate revenue.
So how does ChatGPT choose which products to recommend? Why were those specific espresso machines and office chairs listed first when the user typed the prompt?
“It’s not looking for specific signals that are in some algorithm,” says Fry. According to him, this will be a shopping experience that’s more personalized and conversational, rather than keyword-focused. “It’s trying to understand how people are reviewing this, how people are talking about this, what the pros and cons are,” says Fry. If you say that you prefer only buying black clothes from a specific retailer, then ChatGPT will supposedly store that information in its memory the next time you ask for advice about what shirt to buy, giving you recommendations that align with your tastes.
The reviews that ChatGPT features for products will pull from a blend of online sources, including editorial publishers like WIRED as well as user-generated forums like Reddit. Fry says that users can tell ChatGPT which types of reviews to prioritize when curating a list of recommended products.
One of the most pressing questions for online publishers with this new release is likely how affiliate revenue will work in this situation. Currently, if you read WIRED’s review of the best office chairs and decide to purchase one through our link, we get a cut of the revenue and it supports our journalism. How will affiliate revenue work inside of ChatGPT shopping when the tool recommends an office chair that OpenAI knows is a good pick because WIRED, among others, gave it a good review?
