OpenAI announced in late April that it had launched a shopping feature inside ChatGPT . Now, it’s working to monetize that function, according to a report from the Financial Times.
The AI giant is reportedly planning to take commission from sales that occur on ChatGPT; in order to accomplish that, per the FT, it is working to integrate checkout into the large language model’s (LLM) interface, rather than directing users to a brand or retailer’s site to complete the purchase.
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The technology company announced earlier this year it had inked a partnership with Shopify, which the FT reported could influence the company’s ability to add the checkout feature.
In April, OpenAI told Sourcing Journal it had no plans to allow brands and retailers to purchase paid placements or advertisements for their products on ChatGPT. That still seems to be the case, according to company’s website, which states that third-party providers it contracts with help determine how products are displayed to a ChatGPT user.
“When a user clicks on a product, we may show a list of merchants offering it. This list is generated based on merchant and product metadata we receive from third-party providers,” the company’s site notes. “Currently, the order in which we display merchants is predominantly determined by these providers. We do not re-rank merchants based on factors such as price, shipping, or return policies. We expect this to evolve as we continue to improve the shopping experience.”
Still, brands and retailers may soon owe OpenAI a fraction of the price of the sale its technology helps facilitate.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, hinted that the move toward monetizing might be coming in a comment made in the Straterchy newsletter.
“We’re never going to take money to change placement or whatever, but if you buy something through [ChatGPT] that you found, we’re going to charge like a 2 percent affiliate fee or something,” Altman reportedly said.
The Financial Times’ report did not indicate how much commission OpenAI might look to grab.
To date, OpenAI’s revenue has come primarily from subscriptions—both individual and enterprise—to its technology systems. AJ Ghergich, global vice president at search optimization platform Botify , said the shift in business model makes sense, particularly as the company works to restructure as a for-profit entity.
“ChatGPT is guiding shoppers from ‘What should I buy?’ to ‘I just bought it’ in a single conversation. Capturing a small commission aligns OpenAI’s revenue with the real commercial value its recommendations already create,” Ghergich told Sourcing Journal.
Shoppers are increasingly turning to LLMs, including ChatGPT, during their shopping journeys. According to Adobe , just under half of U.S. consumers use generative AI for product recommendations, while 43 percent use it for gifting inspiration. But those numbers are likely to grow; the firm’s data also showed that 53 percent of consumers plan to use AI to shop in 2025.
Starting with AI, or including AI in a shopping journey, has started to change the way consumers buy—and could see a hit to some brands and retailers’ site traffic, since LLMs’ crawlers are ingesting and aggregating product information on consumers’ behalfs, sometimes without the consumer ever visiting the product page. Ghergich said if companies choose not to play ball with eventual fees handed down from OpenAI, they could stymie their growth or dent customer affinity.
“The bigger risk isn’t the commission fee; it’s being absent when 53 percent of consumers plan to use AI for shopping this year,” he said. “You can’t sell to customers you can’t reach.”
OpenAI did not immediately return Sourcing Journal’s request for comment on the monetization of ChatGPT shopping.
Ghergich said the report about ChatGPT’s plans to charge commission isn’t surprising, particularly when contextualized with moves from other technology providers.
For instance, security company Cloudflare announced at the outset of the month that it would begin allowing website publishers to block AI-based crawlers from entering their site if they don’t want their content ingested by certain AI systems. What’s more, the company said, some clients would be eligible to beta test a program it calls “pay per crawl,” which would require crawlers’ owners to pay fees—akin to a paywall in media—to access and ingest content.
Ghergich predicts these companies’ moves are only the genesis of the future of AI-based commerce.
“We are watching the birth of conversational commerce,” Ghergich said. “Cloudflare is asking AI crawlers to pay for data; OpenAI is charging for the sale. The common theme is value alignment: platforms are planting toll booths wherever AI meets commerce or content.”
