ChatGPT Shopping requirements: check your store qualifies before you optimise it

A product reaches ChatGPT by one of three routes, and each has its own rules:

• Shopify stores are carried by Shopify Catalog, which Shopify switches on by default for eligible stores and which OpenAI's help centre says needs no extra work from the merchant. A Shopify store answers to Shopify's store and product requirements and to OpenAI's commerce policies.
• Approved partners send OpenAI a product feed under its feed specification, and answer to that specification as well.
• Every other store is read by OAI-SearchBot, OpenAI's search crawler, from its product pages, and has only OpenAI's policies and its crawler to satisfy. That is the shortest list, and one that a robots.txt rule written years ago can fail.

The checklist at the end runs all three in order.

OpenAI's commerce policies, updated 29 September 2026, set the eligibility standards for product listings in its shopping experiences and apply whichever route a product takes. OpenAI may remove a listing or restrict a merchant for any reason. The prohibited list is long:

• Adult products and gambling.
• Cannabis, prescription-only medicines and supplements marketed for weight loss or sexual enhancement.
• Counterfeits and pirated content.
• Alcohol over 0.5% ABV, tobacco and nicotine, vaping included.
• Firearms, ammunition and self-defence weapons such as pepper spray.
• Recalled products, crypto and NFTs.
• In-game currency and other account-linked digital goods, though complete video games and conventional software are allowed.

The same page bans merchant practices: fake reviews and fabricated endorsements, misrepresented price, availability, origin or condition, hidden fees and misleading return terms.

Then there is access. OpenAI's crawler documentation says a site opted out of OAI-SearchBot is not shown in ChatGPT search answers, only as a navigational link, and that a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to register. GPTBot is a separate control for OpenAI's model training, and ChatGPT-User is not used to decide what appears in search. The AI crawlers entry lists the agents and their rules.

Shopify's ChatGPT page gives the store rules:

• The store sells to customers in the United States, though it can be based outside the United States.
• Its terms of service, privacy policy and return and refund policy are completed under Settings, Policies.
• The merchant has agreed to the Agentic Storefronts Supplemental Terms of Service.
• There are no ChatGPT fees beyond standard payment processing, and the customer checks out on your own online store, in ChatGPT's in-app browser or a new tab.

Shopify Catalog's own requirements add the account side: the Starter plan or higher, no private mode or password protection, products published to the online store or a Hydrogen or Headless channel, and a store that does not serve business customers only. Shopify also lists account standing: a verified email, two-step authentication, identity and business verification when prompted, genuine sales fulfilled promptly, a low chargeback rate and invoices paid on time. Eligibility is reviewed over time and can be lost.

The verdict is in the admin under Sales channels, Agentic: the Shopify Catalog source shows a product count or an Ineligible warning, and the warning opens to the reason, such as a password-protected or locked store.

The same requirements page rules on products one by one. Each needs a title, at least one image and a price above zero; free products are left out. It must be published with an identifiable product URL, must not have Unlisted status and must not be hidden from search engines. It must carry no sensitive content in its images or description, and it must not fall into an excluded category.

Shopify's excluded list runs from alcohol and homebrewing supplies, tobacco and vaping, drugs and CBD, prescription and medical products, through weapons of every kind including archery and paintball, explosives and fireworks, laboratory and hazardous goods, adult content and sexual wellness, bullion and collectible coins, to services, subscriptions, warranties, event tickets, live animals and anything Shopify classifies as Uncategorized.

Two details catch stores that pass everything else:

• Shopify classifies products from the product information itself, which can differ from the category set in the admin, so a thin record can land in Uncategorized or in an excluded category by mistake. Shopify says complete and accurate product information helps it classify products correctly. Sighted meets a version of this from the shopper's side: SO-ME, the consumer shopping platform Sighted powers, receives product feeds from retailers including ASOS, REVOLVE, Vinted, M&S, New Look, Debenhams and EGO, and one kind of product arrives under different categories and with different attributes depending on the feed.
• On the ChatGPT page Shopify asks that any legal disclosure a product needs sits within the first 6,000 characters of its description.

Products sold only to business customers are excluded where Shopify can detect it, and OpenAI's prohibited list applies on top of Shopify's.

OpenAI's getting-started guide says onboarding product feeds is currently available to approved partners, who apply through the form at chatgpt.com/merchants, upload the catalogue over SFTP and, as OpenAI recommends, keep it current with a full snapshot at least once a day. Products must be legal, safe and appropriate for a general audience, and the merchant is responsible for compliance.

The feed specification then validates every row:

• Nine fields are required: item_id, title, description, url, brand, seller_name, image_url, availability and price.
• Availability must be one of in_stock, out_of_stock, pre_order, backorder or unknown, and a missing or unrecognised value rejects the row.
• Price is a decimal, a space and an uppercase currency code, as in 79.99 USD.
• A GTIN, if sent, is 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits with a valid check digit, and no invented MPN may stand in for a missing one.
• OpenAI asks for titles of at most 150 characters and plain-text descriptions of at most 5,000. URLs are absolute and public.
• Placeholders such as null or n/a are invalid in any field, and is_eligible_search defaults to true.

One rule matters for stores outside North America: a standard upload targets the United States, target_countries currently represents US, CA and MX, and further markets open only after OpenAI confirms them for your integration. The ChatGPT Shopping feed page covers the file column by column.

Passing every rule gets a product into the pool. OpenAI says that not all available products are shown, that a product appears when ChatGPT perceives it relevant to the shopper's intent, and that the merchants for a chosen product are ranked on availability, price, quality and whether they are the maker or primary seller. The feed specification says the same of its eligibility flag: it does not guarantee display.

So the checklist is the floor. The ranking factors that decide the rest, and the causes of a product that passes and still never appears, each have a guide of their own.

The access rule is the one that does not look like a requirement, because no eligibility screen flags it. In Sighted's pilot with Onboard Sportswear, the work included the site itself: Sighted consolidated duplicate URLs, submitted the site's first sitemap, addressed indexing gaps and enriched the products. By its end, AI citation coverage had gone from 0% to 33% of the tested responses, organic clicks were up 59% and Google AI-feature impressions up 1,140%.

Do you have to apply to be in ChatGPT Shopping?

Not on Shopify, where the channel is active by default for eligible stores, and not for crawl, which needs only access. Only a direct feed needs an application, and OpenAI currently takes approved partners.

Is there a fee?

Shopify says none beyond standard payment processing, and OpenAI says product results are not ads and are not influenced by partnerships. Ads in ChatGPT are a separate surface.

Does a store outside the United States qualify on Shopify?

Yes, if it sells to customers in the United States. Shopify's rule is about the market served, and its page says the store can be based elsewhere. The UK guide covers what that means for a British store.

Does blocking GPTBot fail the access requirement?

No. GPTBot is OpenAI's training crawler and a separate control; the access requirement is met or failed by what robots.txt says to OAI-SearchBot.

1. Read robots.txt as OAI-SearchBot would: a group of its own, or the wildcard rules, must allow your product URLs, and the firewall must admit the addresses OpenAI publishes at openai.com/searchbot.json.
2. Check every category you sell against OpenAI's commerce policies, and remove or flag the products that fall under a prohibited heading.
3. On Shopify, confirm the store sells to customers in the United States and that the three policies are completed under Settings, Policies.
4. Agree to the Agentic Storefronts Supplemental Terms of Service, and confirm the plan is Starter or higher, the store is not password protected and the B2B-only option is off.
5. Open Sales channels, Agentic, and read the Shopify Catalog source: a product count, or an Ineligible warning that opens to the reason.
6. For each product: a title, an image, a price above zero, published to the online store, not Unlisted, not hidden from search engines.
7. Check Shopify's classification of each product, since Uncategorized and the excluded categories are judged on that, not on your own category.
8. Put any legal disclosure inside the first 6,000 characters of the description.
9. If you are an approved partner with a feed: the nine required fields, a recognised availability value, a price with its currency code, a valid GTIN or none, no placeholders.
10. Send a full snapshot daily, as OpenAI recommends, and again when a sale starts or ends or stock changes, because the dates in the feed schedule nothing.
11. Compare price and availability across the page, its structured data and any feed, so ChatGPT is not reading two different stores.

The free AI visibility audit runs the access check for the whole site: it reads robots.txt and reports which AI crawlers are allowed, OAI-SearchBot among them, and reports a blocked crawler as a gap for every product at once. On each product page it finds, up to 50, it reads the structured data, title, description, price, availability, variants and photos, and checks that the price is present both in the markup and on the visible page.

The readiness score inside the product applies the format rules a feed would: a currency on the price, a recognised availability value, https links, a GTIN of 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits.

For the product rules, Sighted enriches the catalogue at scale: it writes the attributes each product's category needs from the merchant's own descriptions, options and photos, in the store's voice, for the merchant to approve, which is also what gives Shopify's classifier a record it can place. On Shopify the approved values are written back into the product's own fields and category attributes, so Shopify Catalog carries them.

For approved OpenAI partners it builds the ChatGPT Shopping feed to the specification, with the seller name, store country and return policy columns filled from the details you give the feed. The same technology powers SO-ME, where the matching happens from the shopper's side.