Overview

Artificial intelligence assistants are reshaping the way shoppers locate and purchase products online. Amazon’s in‑platform chatbot, Rufus, confines its recommendations to Amazon’s own catalog, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT Shopping pulls items from any retailer on the web and now supports direct checkout through a Shopify‑backed commerce protocol. Sellers must understand both systems to decide where to invest their optimization efforts.

Key Points

• User reach — Rufus logged roughly 250 million users in 2025, with monthly active users climbing 140 % year over year.
• Conversion boost — Shoppers who interact with Rufus convert about 60 % better than the Amazon average.
• Search domain — Rufus only searches Amazon listings; ChatGPT Shopping scans the open web and returns results from any merchant that supplies structured product data.
• Checkout method — Rufus completes purchases inside Amazon; ChatGPT Shopping hands off the transaction to the merchant via the open‑source Commerce Protocol built with Shopify.
• Optimization levers — Rufus rewards enriched Amazon listings; ChatGPT Shopping rewards schema markup, frequent feed updates, and strong off‑site authority signals.

How ChatGPT Shopping Works

1. Web crawl and data ingestion — The OAI SearchBot crawls product pages that expose schema.org Product markup, pulling fields such as name, price, availability, brand, GTIN/SKU, and aggregate rating. Example: A Shopify store that tags its “Eco‑Friendly Bamboo Toothbrush” page with full Product schema becomes discoverable in the AI’s index.
2. Query processing and recommendation generation — When a user asks, “What’s the best sustainable toothbrush for travel?” ChatGPT parses the intent, filters the indexed catalog for relevant items, and assembles a side‑by‑side comparison that highlights price, eco‑credentials, and portability. Example: The assistant presents three toothbrushes, noting that the bamboo model scores highest on sustainability but is slightly heavier than a plastic alternative.