• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 28, 2025

OpenAI confirmed Monday that it has begun to roll out a better shopping experience, as well as make several improvements to ChatGPT search in an effort to compete more broadly with Google.

“Search has become one of our most popular & fastest growing features, with over 1 billion web searches just in the past week,” the company wrote in a post on X.

Lines of code that introduced a shopping feature in ChatGPT were identified last week by TestingCatalog, which reports on features of trending apps in AI, web3 and web2.

The lines of code suggested the AI chatbot would offer prices, reviews, and embedded checkout through the AI.

OpenAI said the idea is to make shopping simpler and items faster to find, and to compare and buy products in ChatGPT.

The goal of this feature is to improve product results and to provide visual product details, pricing and reviews and links to buy products in results that have been chosen independently without seeing ads.

The shopping improvements -- which are expected to be completed within days -- began rolling out on Monday to Plus, Pro and Free users as well as logged-out users everywhere ChatGPT is available.

OpenAI said it will soon integrate a memory feature with shopping for Pro and Plus users, allowing ChatGPT to reference a user’s previous chats to further personalized product recommendations.

Previously, it updated ChatGPT to reference its memory feature to support web searches and past chats.

The search update is part of OpenAI’s effort to compete with Google by creating a better, more personalized experience to find products and information on the internet. In addition, it now integrates ChatGPT search with WhatsApp.

The integration allows users to message the company’s chatbot for rapid, real-time answers to questions.

ChatGPT also added the ability to serve multiple citations for a given response, allowing users to learn more or verify information across more sources.

A new "highlight" UI provides clarity to show the part of the answer that which the citation refers to.

Part of the update includes the ability to search faster and identify trending topics. It also serves autocomplete suggestions.

It’s not clear whether Microsoft, which has reportedly invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, will benefit from this technology or changes.