OpenAI rolls out AI shopping assistant in ChatGPT— but is it reliable enough for your next purchase?

OpenAI has launched a young shopping help feature film within ChatGPT that helps users equate products, assess specifications, and bring forth personalised buying guides. This launch, announced on Monday, comes just as consumers around the globe head into the peak holiday spending season, with Black Friday around the corner.

This AI assistant, now available to both free and paid ChatGPT users on web and mobile, delivers personalized buyer's guide within minutes. It does so by conducting deep researches across the internet, reviewing quality sources, and drawing on ChatGPT’s understanding of a user's past conversations and memory, according to a blog post by OpenAI.

This isn't the only AI company entering the space. Just a day later, Perplexity also rolled out its own AI shopping assistant, offering shopping recommendations tailored to what it already knows about users, like where they live or what they do for work.

How reliable is ChatGPT's shopping guide?

The feature works as a guide for users looking for, say, a gift for their niece, a bike for daily travel or a quiet vacuum cleaner. ChatGPT will pull out up-to-date details of the products, such as pricing, availability, reviews and technical specifications (if any) from public retail websites. Users can choose from these options with ease.

The system is powered by a version of GPT‑5 mini that was post-trained specifically for shopping tasks. It is trained to read “trusted sites, cite reliable sources, and synthesize information across many sources to produce high-quality product research”, the company said.

According to the company, the shopping assistant is built to be fully transparent with users. It says chats are never shared with retailers, and all results are organic — pulled from publicly available retail sites. The tool reads product pages directly, cites its sources, and avoids low-quality or spammy websites to ensure trustworthy recommendations.

Are there any limitations in what it can do?

Even though the model behind the shopping assistant performs better than ChatGPT's other models in internal evaluations, especially when it comes to accurately pulling product details from the web, it can still make mistakes, OpenAI cautioned all users in its blog post.

The company further noted that shopping research might make mistakes about product details, such as fetching the right price and availability. “We encourage you to visit the merchant site for the most accurate details,” it said.

OpenAI also revealed that in the future, users will be able to make purchases directly through ChatGPT for merchants that support Instant Checkout⁠, wherever it is available.

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