With artificial intelligence’s role in holiday shopping poised to grow in 2025, OpenAI launched new shopping research features for its ChatGPT users.
The updated experience, which will vie for gift-seekers alongside Perplexity’s agentic commerce tools and Google’s new shopping features, adds personalized suggestions, feedback and more across ChatGPT’s apps and subscription tiers.
The features also lay the groundwork for personalized buyer’s guides that will integrate directly with ChatGPT’s checkout experience.
How ChatGPT’s shopping research features recommend gifts
The latest wave of AI-enabled features for shopping within ChatGPT emphasizes research recommendations and follow-up questions, geared toward tailored guides. In a Nov. 24 blog post, OpenAI shared that shopping research was already available on its mobile app and website for logged-in users. Moreover, it will be accessible to Free, Go, Plus and Pro plan users.
As part of the launch, OpenAI also said it would loosen usage limits during the holiday season.
Examples of the types of queries ChatGPT will field include:
- Gift recommendations based on recipient descriptions.
- Guidance on sales and discount codes.
- Product comparisons, either visually or by text-based details.
The features will appear both automatically when ChatGPT sees a user entering a shopping-related prompt and through a “shopping research” option on the app’s menu.
ChatGPT’s next steps into ecommerce
Shopping research in ChatGPT builds off of the platform’s existing AI assistant, checkout and agentic commerce efforts. Specifically, OpenAI noted that in the future users will “be able to purchase directly through ChatGPT for merchants who are part of Instant Checkout where available.” Checkout within OpenAI debuted in 2025 with Etsy and Shopify merchants as early users. In October, ChatGPT and Walmart also announced a partnership to enable purchases. Then, in November, ChatGPT and Target announced a partnership as well.
Instant Checkout in ChatGPT is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which OpenAI co-developed with the payments vendor Stripe.
The new shopping-specific experience relies on a version of OpenAI’s GPT‑5 mini AI model. ChatGPT refers to this as a “mini model post-trained on GPT‑5-Thinking-mini.” The resulting model is designed to deliver responses that are more accurate than those from ChatGPT’s other models in use cases for shopping.
For comparison, OpenAI shared that its own testing showed shopping research to have an accuracy rating of 64% in its subject domain, as compared to 56% for GPT-5-Thinking and 37% for ChatGPT Search. OpenAI measures accuracy by how well products in responses meet users’ expectations, taking into account details such as price, color or material.
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