ChatGPT shopping term/chatgpt-shopping

What it is

For buying-advice questions ChatGPT renders a product carousel. What's inside comes from three layers: the products reference in the conversation object (base card: title, one price, rating), one product_entity per product from POST /backend-api/search/product_update (32 fields, including the offers array with merchant prices broken down into base/shipping/tax/total, plus stock and delivery text), and model-generated short descriptions from product_carousel_descriptions — which vary between two calls on the same day.

Measured across five measuring days (20–23 and 26 Aug 2026, 140 runs): 25 runs with a carousel (the buying-advice categories K2, K3, K7), 77 products (52 distinct), 182 offers — 2.4 per product. 112 product_update requests, 36 carousel descriptions. 81 distinct merchants, led by Amazon.de (22 offers incl. marketplace sellers) and the MediaMarktSaturn group (23 across three storefronts).

The feed, not the site

Every product carries a 19-digit Google Shopping ID; across all 182 offers the provider is exclusively p2 — the p1/p2/p3 provider system is in place, but only the Google Shopping feed has delivered so far. Exactly one offer per product carries the "Best price" tag (52 of 52 products): the best-price logic runs on feed comparison, not on the merchants' page content.

utm_source=chatgpt.com

182 of 182 merchant URLs (100%) carry utm_source=chatgpt.com. For merchants this means: the traffic is already visible and attributable in their own analytics — the question is not whether ChatGPT sends customers, but whether you have found that row in your report yet.

Instant checkout: infrastructure yes, rollout no

Every offer's field list includes checkoutable, checkout_payload and checkout_image_urls — the complete infrastructure for buying without leaving ChatGPT. Observed: checkoutable is false in all 182 offers, checkout_payload always null. The day this flips is wired as a high event (checkoutable (instant checkout)).

For visibility

The product data does not come from crawling the merchant's site but from a purchased feed with Google Shopping IDs (provider p2). Whoever is not listed there does not exist in the carousel — regardless of how well their own site ranks. Every merchant URL carries utm_source=chatgpt.com: merchants can see this traffic in their own analytics.

Change history

No event has touched this object yet.

Open

• Source of the panel sections 'Good to know' / 'What others say' (per-source review synthesis): neither the conversation object nor product_update. Suspicion: WebSocket — the runner records WS frames since 26 Aug (ws-frames.jsonl); the next regular run should settle it.
• Instant checkout rollout: checkoutable is 0 of 182 offers so far, checkout_payload always null — the field list is there, the switch is not flipped. The differ reports the first checkoutable offer as a high event.
• Strike-through prices (original_price) and unavailable offers: the fields exist, not a single value in 182 offers so far. Either the feed filters upfront, or our prompts never hit discounted stock.

Related

product_entity checkoutable (instant checkout) offers_see_more_boundary Shopping providers (p1/p2/p3) Products per carousel Offers per product Carousel rate products backend-api-search-product-update