Digital Economy

Now ChatGpt challenges Google and comparison sites for online shopping

We can now search for products with ChatGpt's artificial intelligence, directly in chat

29 April 2025

3' min read

We can now search for products with ChatGpt's artificial intelligence, directly in the chat. Shopping support is one of the search upgrades introduced yesterday by OpenAi to Chatgpt, for all users (including free users), and is probably the most useful, although - as you can see from our test - it still has important limitations.

The aim is to give the user a list of products, with prices, answering specific queries. The chatbot thus wants to replace a search on Google Shopping or other comparison sites. It is in fact a further challenge to Google and its search engine.

How shopping on Chagpt works

Before this update, when asking Chatgpt to recommend products or compare purchase options, the system could only rely on pre-trained knowledge or textual web searches. Instead, it can now search for real offers, compare up-to-date prices and directly suggest links to available products from reliable commercial sources.

In practice, when we ask "What are the best running shoes under 100 euros?" or "What laptop do you recommend for video editing?", Chatgpt no longer just answers in a generic or theoretical way. It opens a real web search, finds products on sale at that moment, and offers you a list with product name, price, short description, direct link to purchase when available.

In short: the big difference from before is that the information is now anchored in the actual inventory of online shops, no longer just based on historical data or abstract examples.

In addition, behind the scenes, ChatGPT applies an intelligent filter to show only products that are really available, relevant to your request and from reliable sources.

There are limits. We asked him to recommend a tablet with a large screen and he only proposed unknown Chinese models. Why? We asked him: 'the shopping search system ChatGPT uses at the moment is mainly connected to generalist marketplaces and offer aggregators, not to premium proprietary catalogues. Therefore, it often tends to prioritise products: more recently uploaded to marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Aliexpress; with immediate availability and competitive pricing; less 'protected' by trade restrictions (e.g. Apple does not allow all retailers to freely display updated prices via scraping or public feeds)'.

If we explicitly ask it to include core products, Chatgpt might revert to a traditional search, not anchored to live shopping databases.

More improvements coming from OpenAI.

There are more improvements to the search since yesterday. It is now possible to send a WhatsApp message to Chatgpt to receive updated answers. Chatgpt can now include multiple citations for the same idea, so users can drill down or verify information from multiple sources. A new 'highlight' interface has also been introduced to show more clearly which part of the answer the quote refers to.

Users can now search more quickly thanks to the real-time suggestions provided by Chatgpt.

In addition, our chat history will also work with search and shopping. The chatbot will take into account the context of past conversations to help find better answers. As always, the user has full control over the Chatgpt memory and can update it at any time in the settings.

It is a novelty that, however, will come to us later, due to the usual issues of compliance with EU privacy rules.

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