Six shelves.
Two rails. One feed.

OpenAI merchant product feed — a ~79-field spec (~19 required), pushed at least daily with support for much faster updates — plus third-party pricing and review sources.

Apply via the ChatGPT Merchant Portal; Shopify catalogs integrate directly. Ranking is organic and unsponsored: structured metadata (price, availability, variants) plus review quantity, freshness, and specificity.

OpenAI launched in-chat Instant Checkout in 2025, then pivoted in March 2026 to discovery-first: feeds decide who appears, and buyers are routed to your own storefront to pay.

Microsoft Merchant Center feed — it accepts the Google Shopping feed format you already maintain — plus Bing crawl of product pages, navigation, and reviews.

Shopify merchants are enrolled automatically (with opt-out); others onboard via Microsoft Merchant Center, with checkout enabled through PayPal, Stripe (ACP), or Shopify rails.

Merchant stays merchant of record; your existing Google feed does double duty here.

The Shopping Graph — 60 billion+ listings, refreshed around two billion times an hour — fed primarily by Google Merchant Center; on-page Product schema (JSON-LD) validates and enriches.

No feed, no shelf: products absent from Merchant Center don’t enter the Shopping Graph or AI Mode shopping results. Keep feed and page schema stating identical facts — conflicts reduce eligibility and trust.

One Merchant Center feed + page schema covers AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Gemini at once.

Same Shopping Graph and search-result ecosystem; no extra markup beyond feed + schema is required — Google states there is no special AI Overviews tag.

Maintained feed and schema, plus page quality, carry over directly. Coverage is a byproduct of doing Google AI Mode correctly.

Still the widest-reach AI surface for discovery traffic that lands on your own store.

Same Shopping Graph (Merchant Center / Manufacturer Center); product cards are built from your feed data, including images.

Thin, field-poor products are filtered before conversational recommendation even begins. Brands can supplement authoritative product data via Manufacturer Center.

The third surface covered by the same Google feed investment — Universal Cart now spans Search and the Gemini app.

Two channels: the free Merchant Program catalog (CSV/XML API, SFTP, or S3 — richer data earns visibility advantages) and PerplexityBot crawling the open web.

Upload your catalog via the Merchant Program; without it, visibility depends entirely on public page quality. Run both channels — they compound.

PayPal-network merchants join via opt-in Store Sync; PayPal then handles payment, identity, and buyer protection in-chat.