How to get your products recommended by ChatGPT

By 7BE ResearchPublished 25 October 2026

To get your products recommended by ChatGPT, make them easy for it to read and easy to trust. ChatGPT picks products from what it can find about them: your product data, your pages, your reviews and what other sites say about you. No one can pay for a place in its product results, so the work is to measure where you stand, fix the gaps the answers show, and check again every week.

Below are the levers in the order we would work on them, with steps for Shopify and WooCommerce where they differ.

How does ChatGPT decide which products to recommend?

Ask ChatGPT for “a carry-on backpack for a week of travel under $150” and it usually names a few products, often as cards with an image and a price, each with a short reason. It builds that answer from two kinds of input:

• Product data: name, price, availability, images and reviews, from merchants and data providers.
• Web sources: when it searches, ChatGPT reads reviews, buying guides, forums, marketplaces and store pages, and links to the ones it used.

OpenAI's help center says a product appears when ChatGPT judges it relevant to the shopper's intent, based on the question and context such as Memory. When several merchants sell the same product, their order depends on factors such as availability, price, quality and whether the merchant makes or mainly sells it.

The shopper then buys on the store's own site. OpenAI launched an in-chat Instant Checkout in September 2025, and Hypotenuse reports it was retired in March 2026. So a recommendation becomes a visit to your product page, and that page has to confirm what the answer said.

The full picture is in how AI assistants choose products.

1. How do I see what ChatGPT recommends in my category?

Start with the answers, before you change anything.

1. Write 10 to 20 questions the way your shoppers type them. Mix broad ones (“best linen sheets”) with ones that carry a need, a budget or a comparison (“linen sheets for hot sleepers under $200”). Borrow words from your customer emails and reviews.
2. Ask each one in a temporary chat, so your own Memory and past chats do not shape the answer.
3. Ask each question more than once. Answers change from run to run, so one answer is a sample.
4. Record five things per answer: whether your store is named, which of your products, who is named instead, the reason given for each pick, and the sources linked.

The reasons matter most: they show what ChatGPT needed to know, and they become your fix list for steps 2 to 6.

The free 7BE scan does a first pass for you. It writes 10 shopper questions from your catalog, asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, and shows how often you are named, the brands named instead of you and the sites behind the answers.

2. What product data does ChatGPT need?

ChatGPT can only repeat facts it can find. Give every product the basics in a form machines read without guessing:

• a name that says what the product is;
• brand, price, currency and availability;
• a category and product type, named the way shoppers search;
• variants with plain option names, such as size, colour and material;
• a GTIN or other barcode, where the product has one;
• several images, each with alt text that says what it shows.

Then check that your product pages carry schema.org Product structured data with those facts, and a rating once you have reviews. Test a page in Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator.

• Shopify: your products reach ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog, which Shopify says infers categories and extracts attributes from your listings. Give it less to guess: set the product category from Shopify's standard taxonomy, fill in the category metafields it suggests, and put GTINs in each variant's Barcode field. See ChatGPT shopping for Shopify stores.
• WooCommerce: nothing sends your catalog to ChatGPT on its own. WooCommerce adds Product structured data to product pages, so test that your theme or a plugin has not removed it. To send a feed, apply through OpenAI's merchant form; its documentation says feed onboarding is open to approved partners. See WooCommerce and AI shopping.

3. How should I write product descriptions for ChatGPT?

Shoppers ask ChatGPT for a product that fits a need. A description that says who the product is for gives it something to match. One that only says “premium” and “timeless” gives it nothing to quote. Rewrite your best sellers first, in this order:

1. One opening sentence: what the product is and who it is for.
2. The specs shoppers compare in your category, as plain facts with units.
3. Two or three use cases, in the shopper's own words.
4. Answers to the questions you get by email: fit, care, compatibility, what is in the box.

Use the reasons from step 1 as a checklist. If ChatGPT recommends a rival's skillet because it comes pre-seasoned and works on induction, and yours does too, those facts belong in your first two sentences. Our guide to product descriptions AI can recommend has a full before and after. On Shopify, keep repeated specs in metafields. On WooCommerce, add them under Product data → Attributes.

4. Do reviews help products get recommended by ChatGPT?

Reviews are among the reasons ChatGPT gives most often: a rating, how many people left one, what buyers say about fit or how a product holds up. OpenAI says its review summaries come from public reviews and that it does not verify them.

• Ask every buyer for a review a few days after delivery.
• Use a review app that shows reviews in the page itself and adds the rating to your structured data. Reviews that load only through a script may be missed by crawlers.
• Shopify: install a review app such as Judge.me, Yotpo or Okendo and switch on its option to add ratings to structured data, if it has one.
• WooCommerce: reviews are built in. Turn them on, with star ratings, under WooCommerce → Settings → Products.

Never buy or invent reviews. In the US, the FTC's rule on fake reviews bans fake reviews and paying for positive ones.

5. Do shipping and return policies affect ChatGPT recommendations?

Shoppers add conditions to their questions: free returns, ships to Canada, arrives by Friday. ChatGPT can only point them to a store whose policies say so in public. Publish shipping and returns pages that state where you ship, how long it takes, what it costs, how many days a buyer has to return, and who pays for the return. Link both from your footer. On Shopify, write them under Settings → Policies. On WooCommerce, publish a shipping page and a refund and returns page.

6. How do I get mentioned on the sites ChatGPT cites?

When ChatGPT searches, it reads what others say about your category and links to those pages. A product praised there has more reasons to be named. Start from the sources you recorded in step 1:

• Editorial roundups. Find the writers behind the “best of” lists cited for your category and offer a sample, with the facts they test for.
• Reddit and forums. Take part as yourself, say you work for the brand, answer the question that was asked, and follow each community's rules. Never post praise from accounts that hide who you are.
• Marketplaces. A listing on Amazon, Etsy or a marketplace for your category, with its own reviews, is one more page that confirms the product and how buyers rate it.

This is the slowest lever. It is earned, it takes time, and you only partly control it.

7. Should I block GPTBot or OAI-SearchBot?

OpenAI runs separate crawlers for separate jobs, and its crawler documentation says each setting is independent of the others:

• OAI-SearchBot finds pages for ChatGPT search. OpenAI says sites that opt out will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
• GPTBot collects content that may be used to train OpenAI's models. Blocking it does not take you out of search.
• ChatGPT-User visits a page when a person's request needs it, and robots.txt rules may not apply to it.

If you want to be recommended, let OAI-SearchBot in. A crawler you do not name follows your User-agent: * rules, so you usually only need to remove a group that blocks it. To keep your content out of training, block GPTBot alone:

# Opt out of OpenAI model training only.
# ChatGPT search uses OAI-SearchBot, which this does not touch.
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

OpenAI says its search systems can take about 24 hours to pick up a robots.txt change. On Shopify, robots.txt can only be changed through a robots.txt.liquid theme template. On WooCommerce, check for a real robots.txt file in the site's root folder and for your SEO plugin's robots.txt editor. Some hosting and network services, Cloudflare among them, can block AI crawlers too, so check those settings. The AI-readiness checklist covers this and seven other checks.

8. How often should I check what ChatGPT recommends?

Every week, because answers move as ChatGPT, your competitors and the web change. Ask the same questions on the same day each week, record the same five things, and note what you changed and when. Count the share of answers that name you, since single answers vary. After a few weeks you can see which fixes moved the answers.

The 7BE app, in early access, does this every week. Starter ($49 a month) tracks 50 questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode. Growth ($149 a month) tracks 200 and adds Gemini and Claude. It comes as an app for Shopify and a plugin for WooCommerce.

The checklist

• Write 10 to 20 shopper questions and record who ChatGPT names, the reasons and the sources.
• Give every product a category, brand, price, availability, a GTIN where it has one, images, and Product structured data.
• Open each best seller's description with what it is and who it is for, then the specs and use cases.
• Ask every buyer for a review, and put the rating in the page.
• Publish shipping and returns pages with the facts, linked from the footer.
• List the sites cited for your category and work on being mentioned there, honestly.
• Make sure robots.txt and your firewall let OAI-SearchBot in.
• Ask the same questions every week and compare.

To see where you stand today, run the free scan. It asks 10 shopper questions and runs 8 readiness checks on your store, with no signup.