In its latest move to compete with Google’s search product, OpenAI announced it is launching an e-commerce experience inside of ChatGPT, including product recommendations, reviews, and buy buttons that lead directly to the website.
With over a billion searches happening on ChatGPT every week and Google’s search dominance starting to slip, the e-commerce landscape is shifting fast - for direct-to-consumer brands and online retailers, this is a wake up call: if your products aren’t discoverable on AI platforms, you risk being left behind.
Here’s everything you need to do to make sure you’re in the game.
Priority #1: Manage Your Online Reviews
A critical step in preparing your e-commerce store for ChatGPT’s shopping features is managing your online reviews and how people are talking about your brand.
As OpenAI’s product strategist Adam Fry told Wired, this shopping experience “will be more personalized and conversational, rather than keyword-focused. It’s trying to understand how people are reviewing this, how people are talking about this, what the pros and cons are.”
In other words, AI tools will rely heavily on the sentiment and content of your customer feedback to recommend products.
To stay competitive, you need to take control of your online reviews footprint across all relevant platforms where your customers leave feedback, including Google My Business, Trustpilot, Yelp, Facebook Reviews, and industry-specific sites like TripAdvisor or G2, depending on your niche.
Of course, you’ll want to make sure your pages are active and populated, with your logo, a description of your business and products, and links to your website. (And to make sure they’re indexed, link to these review sites from your own website, too.)
But you’ll also want to make sure they’re populated with reviews about the products that you’re trying to highlight.
You want to make sure these pages are active and contain reviews that highlight your products. One method is to use a service like Reviews.Shop which helps you copy and paste reviews from one source (like Google) to others (like TrustPilot) so you squeeze the most out of those hard-earned reviews.
Priority #2: Leveraging Schema Markup to Ensure Your Products are Discoverable by AI Platforms
The next step to positioning your e-commerce store for ChatGPT shopping features is a bit more technical but absolutely crucial: building and optimizing your site’s schema markup.
What is Schema Markup?
Schema markup, also known as structured data, is code you add to your website that helps search engines and AI models like ChatGPT understand the content and the full context of your pages.
By using schema, you’re essentially speaking the language of search engines and AI platforms, making it easier for them to accurately represent your products in search results and conversational shopping experiences.
You may have seen products on Google with things like product ratings, prices, and availability on the search page itself. Most assume this is simply an ad but most often these rich snippets are a result of the website putting work into their schema markup.
How to Check Your Schema
Many direct-to-consumer (DTC) content management platforms, such as Shopify and WordPress, handle basic schema markup for you, but you don’t want to rely on that: e-commerce shop owners must verify that all key product details are being captured and passed through to search and AI platforms.
To check yourself, use tools like the Schema Validator on Schema.org where you can enter your product page URL and see what the Schema is articulating.
If your search returns an error, specifically “unspecified type,” your content management system isn’t generating a schema of any type.
Direct-to-consumer e-commerce operators want to see that their content management system is generating a Schema with the type “Product.” And when you tap into that Product Schema, the list should contain, at minimum:
- type
- name
- URL
- description
- image
- brand
- aggregateRating (including type, ratingValue, and ratingCount)
- offers (especially if you typically run discounts or specials - this would ensure that this information is passed through to the front-end on Google or ChatGPT)
How to Build or Optimize Schema for AI Platforms
If your content management system is missing a schema or if you’re not getting a full set of information generated by default, there are a few potential solutions:
- Leverage plugins or extensions that are available through your content management system. There are tons of Schema plugins for Wordpress, Shopify, and others.
- If your content management system doesn’t provide plugins to get this done, you can do it the old fashioned way, generating your own Schema code (I like the Dentsu Schema builder) and implementing it yourself by embedding the code (from <script> to </script> within the <head> section of your page code.
If You Stay Ready, You Don’t Have to Get Ready
With ChatGPT’s new shopping features, the future of e-commerce is moving toward experiences that are deeply personalized and conversational - and with a popular platform that will soon be able to remember and leverage individual shoppers’ sizes, tastes, and preferences, it’s more important than ever to ensure your product data, reviews, and online reputation are accurate and up to date.
Just as you monitor your product descriptions and SEO, you’ll need to keep a close eye on how your business appears across every channel, from review sites to structured data.
Or risk being left in the dust.
