Nic Dunn, CEO, Charle Agency
Introduction: The Future of Shopping with AI
AI is already changing how customers discover and buy products. With ChatGPT Shopping, shoppers are moving from traditional search to conversational discovery, asking questions and receiving product recommendations directly inside the chat.
ChatGPT Shopping is a ChatGPT experience, with Shopify enabling merchants to surface products with accurate pricing, availability, and purchase options as a dedicated sales channel. You can see how Shopify and OpenAI describe this shift here:
Sell on ChatGPT and
ChatGPT Shopping.
This matters because if your product data and content are not structured for AI, your store risks being invisible when customers are actively looking to buy. This guide shows Shopify brands how to prepare for AI-driven discovery and ensure their products surface at the right moment.
What is conversational commerce and why it changes everything?
Conversational commerce is the shift from browsing and searching to buying through natural language. Instead of scrolling product listings, customers ask AI tools like ChatGPT questions and receive direct product recommendations, comparisons, and answers in real time.
As these AI systems integrate with platforms like Shopify, discovery and purchase move closer together. A single prompt can now guide a customer from research to selection, and in some cases straight to checkout, without relying on traditional search results or category pages.
For brands, this changes how products are found and chosen. AI often becomes the first touchpoint, shaping which options are presented and how they are described. Brands that optimise for conversational discovery are far more likely to be visible and relevant as this behaviour becomes mainstream.
What is ChatGPT Shopping and how you can prepare?
ChatGPT Shopping allows users to discover and compare products directly through natural language prompts inside ChatGPT. Instead of browsing listings or search results, customers ask questions and receive structured product recommendations based on intent, pricing, availability, and relevance. Unlike traditional search or marketplaces, ChatGPT Shopping is designed to be conversational. The system interprets context and follow up questions, making discovery feel closer to a guided shopping experience than a results page.
Crucially, OpenAI now allows merchants to submit product data directly to ChatGPT via a dedicated merchant waitlist. This enables products to appear natively in ChatGPT Shopping responses, supported by clean feeds, accurate pricing, and availability data. You can view OpenAI’s official merchant submission page here:
ChatGPT Merchant Waitlist.
This does not replace SEO or optimisation best practice. Instead GEO works alongside existing strategies, similar to how Google Merchant Center supports visibility through structured data. With millions of products competing for attention, brands that invest early in strong product data, clear site structure, and customer reviews will be far better positioned to be suggested by AI shopping tools.
Shopify X ChatGPT: What we know so far
The relationship between Shopify and ChatGPT is now confirmed, positioning Shopify as a core commerce platform supporting ChatGPT Shopping and AI-driven product discovery. What initially surfaced through leaked code and developer research has since evolved into an official integration, enabling Shopify merchants to surface products directly inside ChatGPT based on intent, pricing, availability, and relevance.
Early code references such as "shopify_checkout_url", "product_id", and "offer_url" revealed how Shopify products could be surfaced and selected inside the chat interface, with event tracking confirming that sales journeys were already being measured within ChatGPT. These early signals are now reflected in how ChatGPT Shopping operates as a live commerce channel rather than a research tool.
For brands looking to extend conversational commerce beyond basic product discovery, exploring custom ChatGPT integration services and solutions can support more advanced use cases such as automated responses, guided shopping flows, and post purchase support.
For Shopify brands, the takeaway is simple. ChatGPT Shopping is no longer experimental. It is an active sales channel, and brands that invest in clean product data, strong site structure, and customer reviews are far better positioned to be visible as AI-driven commerce continues to scale.
Optimising Your Store for AI Discovery
As AI shopping assistants like ChatGPT become a primary entry point for product discovery, Shopify stores need to be optimised for machines as well as humans. Strong design and branding still matter, but AI-driven discovery depends on how clearly your store communicates product information, pricing, options, and trust signals across every touchpoint. The good news is that many established SEO principles still apply, and when executed properly, they support both traditional search visibility and AI powered commerce.
Unlike classic SEO, which focuses heavily on keywords and rankings, AI discovery relies on clean data, natural language, semantic relevance, and authority. If your products, materials, shipping details, and commercial policies are unclear or inconsistent, AI systems may struggle to confidently surface your store when users ask shopping related questions. This makes site structure, data accuracy, and brand clarity just as important as content itself.
Optimising for AI is not a single task. It is an ongoing strategy that combines technical foundations, content quality, commercial readiness, and brand credibility. In this section, we outline the key areas that influence whether your products appear, how they are described, and why they are selected when customers interact with AI shopping tools.
We will be exploring the following key areas to optimise your Shopify store for AI discovery:
- Product Data and Descriptions: Create clear, detailed product titles and descriptions written in natural language. Include materials, use cases, pricing context, and benefits so AI can confidently match products to customer prompts and shopping intent.
- Structured Data and Schema: Implement accurate product, offer, review, and breadcrumb schema. This helps AI systems extract reliable snippets, understand product relationships, and present consistent responses at scale.
- Collections, Navigation, and Site Structure: Build a logical site structure with well defined collections that reflect common shopping themes and how customers compare options. Clear navigation helps AI understand how products relate to one another.
- Search Intent and Conversational Alignment: Optimise content around the way people naturally ask questions inside AI tools. This includes comparisons, follow up responses, and practical buying queries rather than just short keywords.
- Customer Reviews and Social Proof: Use structured customer reviews to provide sentiment, real world feedback, and trust signals. Reviews help AI assess product quality and suitability when making recommendations.
- Conversational Content and Blog Posts: Support product and collection pages with FAQs, guides, and blog posts that answer common questions about shipping, returns, sizing, and usage. This gives AI more context to draw from when generating responses.
- Feed Readiness and Data Consistency: Maintain clean, accurate product feeds across Shopify, Google Merchant Center, email, and SMS channels. Consistent data ensures AI systems receive up to date pricing, availability, and product options.
- Commercial Trust Signals: Make pricing, shipping policies, returns information, and contact details easy to find and machine readable. Clear commercial information increases AI confidence when suggesting your store as a purchase option.
- Citations, Backlinks, and Referencing: Build authority through high quality backlinks, credible mentions, and referenced content. External validation reinforces trust and helps AI assess your brand as a reliable source.
- Brand and Entity Clarity: Maintain a consistent brand voice across your website, blog posts, founder content, and external platforms. Clear brand identity helps AI systems understand who you are and associate products with your business.
- Post Click Experience and Conversion Quality: Ensure landing pages match the intent of AI-driven traffic. Clear product information, visible pricing, and easy to compare options improve sales outcomes and reinforce positive engagement signals.
- Content Freshness and Ongoing Maintenance: Regularly review product pages, blog posts, and key content to keep information accurate and current. Fresh content signals reliability and reduces the risk of outdated responses.
Optimising Product Data for AI
Your product data is the foundation of AI visibility. Large language models like ChatGPT rely on well-structured, descriptive information to understand and surface your products accurately. This means writing product titles that are clear and specific, and descriptions that use natural language, not keyword stuffing or jargon. Include key attributes like size, colour, material, and use case. For example, instead of “Running Shoes,” go with “Men’s Lightweight Trail Running Shoes – Waterproof, Size 10.” Rich, human-readable content increases your chances of appearing when users ask AI questions like “What are the best waterproof running shoes under £100?”.
Optimising Structured Data & Schema for AI
Schema (or structured data) is a type of code added to your site that helps search engines and AI tools understand the content and context of your pages. Most ecommerce brands already use schema markup to educate search engines about pages, but having it isn’t the same as having it done well. As AI tools like ChatGPT begin surfacing products through natural language queries, they’ll likely lean on structured data to understand your catalogue at scale, especially when parsing content through future product feeds or direct integrations.
Now’s the time to audit your schema for completeness and accuracy. Use tools like Google’s Rich Results Test or Schema Markup Validator to check that your markup complies with the latest standards. Focus on clean implementation of Product, Offer, Review, and Breadcrumb schema, and ensure there’s no duplication or conflicting tags.
In short, structured data is likely to become the bridge between your store and AI engines, and brands with clean, crawlable schema will have a major edge when these tools decide what to show users.
Optimising Collections & Navigation for AI
Your store’s collection structure isn’t just for users, it’s also how AI understands product relationships. Organising your products into well-defined, semantically relevant collections helps ChatGPT and other AI models connect the dots between what customers are asking and what you sell. Avoid overly broad or inconsistent groupings, and use clear naming conventions that reflect how people naturally describe products (e.g. “Vegan Leather Handbags” instead of just “Accessories”).
Ensure each collection page includes a strong heading, supporting text, and ideally, schema markup. AI models crawling your site or ingesting future product feeds will use this structure to infer meaning, so the cleaner and more intuitive your navigation, the easier it is for AI to recommend the right products in response to user prompts.
Optimising Content for AI search intent
AI models don’t search the way humans do, they interpret questions and return answers based on context and natural language. That means your content needs to align with how people ask questions, not just what keywords they type into Google. Think about phrases like “What’s the best moisturiser for sensitive skin under £30?” or “Show me durable backpacks for commuting”, these are the types of prompts customers are already using in ChatGPT.
To stay ahead, brands should actively test AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, ask them questions about your industry, your products, or your competitors. Pay attention to how they respond and what content they surface. This will help you better understand how AI interprets intent and how you can craft content that matches.
Search intent will continue to evolve as AI tools improve, so staying curious and hands-on is key. Optimising your store isn’t a one-off task, it’s about adapting to how discovery works in a conversational future.
Site Speed & AI
AI may be changing how customers discover products, but your store’s user experience still plays a critical role, especially when a user clicks through from a chatbot or AI-generated suggestion. Fast-loading, mobile-optimised stores are more likely to retain users, convert traffic, and rank better across all platforms.
Tools like ChatGPT may prioritise product links that lead to reliable, responsive pages. If your site is slow, cluttered, or broken on mobile, you risk dropping off the discovery journey at the final moment. Prioritise clean design, clear call-to-actions, and an intuitive checkout, especially for mobile users, who may be coming directly from apps like ChatGPT or mobile browsers.
Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to identify quick wins. In an AI-driven landscape, technical performance isn’t just a conversion factor, it’s part of your visibility strategy.
Citations, Authority & Backlinks for AI
As AI tools like ChatGPT surface products and brands in response to shopping queries, they rely heavily on signals of authority and trust. Citations, backlinks, and credible references help AI systems validate which brands are legitimate, established, and worth recommending. This mirrors how AI already answers informational queries today, where trusted sources and well cited content are prioritised.
For ecommerce brands, this means authority is no longer just about rankings. Mentions across reputable publications, partner sites, industry blogs, and review platforms help reinforce brand credibility. High quality backlinks, consistent brand references, and trusted third party validation all contribute to how confidently AI can surface your products when users are comparing options or asking for recommendations.
To stay competitive, brands should actively use AI search discovery tools to analyse which citations, sources, and references are appearing in AI generated responses for their key product categories. Reviewing where competitors are being cited helps identify gaps and opportunities, whether that is earning coverage, improving content depth, or strengthening off site signals that support AI visibility.
In short, authority is becoming a prerequisite for AI-driven discovery. Brands that invest in strong backlinks, credible citations, and referenced content will be far better positioned to be trusted, surfaced, and selected as AI shopping continues to evolve.
Reviews, UGC & AI
As AI models like ChatGPT begin recommending products, they’ll likely favour listings with clear trust signals, and user-generated content (UGC) and product reviews are a powerful source of that. Reviews provide sentiment, context, and social proof that help AI determine product quality, suitability, and customer satisfaction.
Ensure your reviews are structured using schema (e.g. Review or AggregateRating markup), and avoid burying them inside iframes or third-party widgets that can’t be crawled. Consider using review platforms like Yotpo, Okendo, or Junip that allow easy export and visibility to both search engines and AI crawlers.
The more structured and accessible your reviews, the more context you give AI systems, helping your products stand out when users ask questions like “What are the most highly rated natural deodorants?” or “Which running shoes are best for comfort?”
Conversational Content for AI
AI tools like ChatGPT are trained on conversation, not just keywords. That means content written in a natural, question-and-answer format is more likely to match how users phrase queries in real time. Adding FAQs to product pages, category pages, or landing pages can help AI understand your store more clearly and improve your chances of being recommended in a conversational context.
Think about the common questions your customers ask before buying: “Is this suitable for sensitive skin?”, “Does it come with a warranty?”, or “Can I wear this in the rain?” Answer them on-page in clear, simple language that reads like a helpful dialogue.
This type of content doesn’t just help AI, it also supports human users, reduces bounce rates, and builds trust. It’s a low-effort, high-impact way to align your store with how AI understands and communicates information.
Feed Readiness for AI
While direct product syncing with ChatGPT isn’t fully live yet, all signs point to AI platforms using clean, structured product feeds as a primary way to ingest and understand catalogue data. Preparing now puts you ahead of the curve when these integrations roll out.
Start by auditing the product data you send to tools like Google Merchant Center, Klaviyo product feeds, or your Shopify JSON endpoints. Make sure fields like titles, descriptions, prices, availability, and categories are all consistent, complete, and in plain language. Avoid jargon, vague titles, or missing attributes, these create friction for both AI and feed-based platforms.
Getting your data in shape today ensures that when ChatGPT and similar tools open up product feed ingestion, your brand is ready to plug in and perform, not play catch-up.
Tracking AI Search Visibility
As AI-driven discovery becomes more mainstream, brands need visibility into how and where they appear in AI generated responses. Traditional SEO tools do not yet show how products and brands surface inside chat based search experiences, which is where dedicated AI visibility platforms come in. Tools like Peec AI and Profound allow brands to track AI search visibility, monitor citations, and understand how competitors are being referenced across AI powered channels. Using these insights helps teams identify gaps, validate optimisation efforts, and prioritise actions that improve AI-driven discovery over time.
SEO Impact to AI
While AI discovery may differ from traditional search, many core SEO principles still apply, and likely contribute to your visibility within tools like ChatGPT. Search engines and AI models alike look for signals of authority, trust, and content quality.
Efforts like building content clusters around specific topics, earning high-quality backlinks, and creating detailed, value-driven content don’t just boost your rankings on Google, they may also influence how AI perceives and recommends your brand. The more consistent and authoritative your presence is across your site and the web, the more likely it is that ChatGPT will recognise your store as a relevant source.
In other words, good SEO hygiene still matters. Investing in your site’s authority, engagement metrics, and conversion performance strengthens your chances of being surfaced, whether a customer finds you through Google, ChatGPT, or something else entirely.
Preparing your team and business for AI shopping
AI isn’t just changing how customers shop, it’s also changing how internal teams need to think, plan, and operate. Forward-thinking eCommerce brands should start preparing their teams now to stay agile and competitive as AI shopping becomes more integrated with platforms like Shopify.
Begin by creating awareness across departments. Your marketing, development, merchandising, and customer service teams all need to understand how AI tools like ChatGPT impact discovery and conversion. Run short internal sessions to walk through what AI shopping is, what’s coming, and how each function can contribute to optimisation, from writing natural product copy to maintaining clean data feeds.
Encourage experimentation. Give your team time to explore tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, asking product-related questions and reviewing how competitors are appearing in results. This helps build practical awareness of how conversational commerce actually works in the real world.
For technical teams, prioritise data hygiene, feed readiness, and schema compliance. For marketing and content teams, focus on intent-led content, conversational copywriting, and Q&A strategies. Make AI optimisation part of your regular workflow, not just a future task.
Lastly, stay informed. This space is moving fast. Nominate someone internally to monitor updates from Shopify, OpenAI, and other key players, and regularly review your strategy based on how the ecosystem evolves.
Preparing your team now means you won’t just adapt to the future, you’ll be ready to lead it.
AI Tools Shopify Brands Can Use Today
While the buzz around ChatGPT Shopping is growing, there’s already a wide range of AI-powered tools Shopify brands can start using right now to deliver better experiences, boost conversions, and stay ahead of customer expectations.
Smart Search & Merchandising
Tools like Klevu and Voyado use AI to optimise on-site search results, personalise product listings, and automate merchandising rules based on customer behaviour. This ensures shoppers see the most relevant products, without your team manually managing collections.
Personalisation Platforms
Solutions like Nosto or Rebuy use AI to tailor product recommendations, pop-ups, and content blocks in real time based on each shopper’s behaviour, location, and preferences. This creates a more relevant, conversion-friendly journey for every visitor.
Image Generation & Asset Creation
AI tools like Midjourney, Runway, or DALL·E can help generate on-brand visuals for campaigns, landing pages, and social content, saving time and creative resource. They're especially useful for lifestyle shots, placeholder content, or seasonal mockups.
Customer Support Chatbots
Platforms like Gorgias, and Zendesk AI offer conversational support that can answer questions, manage FAQs, and assist with orders, 24/7. These tools can integrate directly into your Shopify store and help free up human agents.
AI Copy & Content Tools
AI writing assistants like Jasper, Copy.ai, or even ChatGPT can be used to create product descriptions, blog content, email copy, and meta tags, helping your team scale high-quality content while keeping tone and structure consistent.
Email & SMS Automation
Platforms like Klaviyo now include AI-powered predictive analytics and content suggestions to optimise campaigns and personalise flows based on user behaviour, helping you send the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
Product Discovery & Quiz Tools
Apps like Octane AI or Presidio offer AI-driven quizzes and guided selling tools to help customers find the right product through conversational journeys, aligning perfectly with the direction of AI-powered commerce.
Conclusion: The AI Shopping Shift Has Already Begun
AI is no longer a future trend, it's here, and it's already reshaping how customers discover, engage with, and buy from eCommerce brands. With ChatGPT Shopping rolling out and signs of deep Shopify integration emerging, the brands that act now will be the ones leading tomorrow’s landscape.
Whether it’s optimising your product data, tightening your schema, or preparing clean product feeds, every step you take today helps position your store for visibility in an AI-powered world. But this isn’t just about visibility, it’s about delivering a faster, smarter, more personalised experience that customers are beginning to expect.
Stay curious. Keep experimenting. Bring your team along for the journey. Because in this new era of conversational commerce, brands that adapt will grow, and brands that lead will thrive.
Charle X AI Shopping
At Charle, we help ambitious Shopify brands prepare for the future of commerce with practical, long-term strategies. From optimising stores for AI driven discovery to preparing for chatbot-led customer journeys, we support merchants at every stage of growth. Through Charle Search, our dedicated SEO and GEO offering, we help brands improve visibility across traditional search engines and emerging AI powered discovery channels, ensuring products surface when customers are actively looking to buy. Whether you are just getting started or ready to scale, we are here to guide you through the AI shift. If you would like to discuss how Charle can support the future growth of your store, get in touch today.
