Yesterday, OpenAI announced a direct integration of product details into their chat. If we can believe some code leaks reported, the ChatGPT experience should even include the final purchase of the selected product.
A click through to your website might no longer be necessary!
Why is this relevant?
Searching on ChatGPT is a drastically different experience than searching through the traditional Google Search box.
And while Google tries to push their AI Mode, ChatGPT is still often the first tool accessed by more and more users.
We have to expect AI Mode or ChatGPT to become our go-to interface handling entire search journeys.
Especially when these tools are able to actually even close a sale.
Given the trust many users bring towards ChatGPT, sharing often private details with the platform, it's to be expected that people will also bring this trust across when faced with a Checkout form of sorts.
An OpenAI product feed is coming
Similar to Google Merchant Center, OpenAI seems to be preparing to read product details from a product feed soon, thus feeding 😅 their internal knowledge graph with real-world, updated data.
If you want to sign up to be notified when your store's feed can be submitted, sign up here https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/
Leverage the control you have
Whatever the full experience will look like, the trend clearly shows that platforms expect us to engage more and more within an AI-driven conversation, asking questions, sharing knowledge, and receiving product recommendations.
I can only expect this to grow even faster once we have voice assistants talk to us like ChatGPT does on their app. Chatting with ChatGPT while cooking dinner and selecting and purchasing a product might soon become second nature.
In order for AI tools like ChatGPT to be able to list your product, they will not only require a product feed. They will want to connect the dots between your product, the challenges it solves, and your target audience.
In order to do this, LLMs (Large Language Models) will rely on semantic relationships learned based on content both from your website, and from the open web.
This gives you a certain amount of control, as we can help you optimize your content for AI engines - but also hints on the importance of a cross-platform approach.
In the same way as your website will be one of the sources to train language models, so will other sites like review sites, product comparisons your competitors might be hosting, social media posts, comments, Reddit threads, medium.com articles and unpacking videos.
Start optimizing your PDPs (product detail pages)
In order to help you optimize your product detail page's semantics, I have created a free custom GPT you can use:
It will ask you to paste your page's content, and then rate the different elements critical to product detail pages on a scale from 1 to 10.
This will clearly show you potential gaps and what to improve!
Get help to do this right
We're in the middle of the "AI gold rush".
This is not the time where you want to get a VA try to figure this out.
It's the time where you want a reliable partner by your side who you trust.
Someone spending every single day working with search, AI and e-commerce, and who can make sure that your resources are invested where it really moves the needle.
Let's have a conversation!