Guide + checklist · Last updated October 27, 2026 · 9 min read
How AI shopping agents find and buy from your store
Guide + Black Friday checklist
Shopping agents buy from what they can read and reach. They find products through feeds, AI search, and live visits to your site, then check out in chat or on your pages. Block the wrong agent or bury your prices and the sale goes to a store the agent can read.
Who this is for
Who should read this.
- Store owner or founder
- Where agents find your products, and five checks to run before Black Friday
- Ecommerce or marketing manager
- Which agents to let in, and how product data affects agent sales
- Web or IT lead
- What agents need from your pages and your checkout
How shopping agents find your products
Agents find products three ways. Most stores need all three working, because each agent leans on a different one.
| Path | How it works | What it needs from you |
|---|---|---|
| Product feed | You send your catalog straight to the AI company. OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) starts with a structured feed of titles, descriptions, images, price, and availability. | An approved merchant account and a current feed. OpenAI recommends a full snapshot at least once a day (OpenAI). |
| AI search index | A search crawler reads your pages ahead of time so your products can appear in answers. | Search crawlers allowed in robots.txt. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won't appear in ChatGPT search answers (OpenAI). |
| Live visit | An assistant or shopping agent opens your page while the customer waits, then reads price, stock, and options. | Pages that load fast, show price and stock as text, and don't block real agents. |
Feed access is limited today. OpenAI says onboarding product feeds is available to approved partners, with applications at chatgpt.com/merchants. Until you're approved, the other two paths carry your store.
How shopping agents buy
A sale finishes in one of three places. The closer checkout sits to the agent, the fewer sales you lose on the way.
| Checkout path | What happens | Where sales get lost |
|---|---|---|
| In the chat | The customer buys without leaving the AI app. The store connects its checkout to the AI company, as with OpenAI's commerce program. | Stores without an integration don't get this option |
| On your site, by the agent | A browser-based agent fills your cart and checkout for the customer | CAPTCHAs, pop-ups, and bot blocks stop the agent mid-checkout |
| On your site, by the customer | The agent sends the customer a link to your product page | Slow pages, missing stock info, or a price that doesn't match the answer |
The second path is where a store can lose agent sales without knowing it. Bot defenses built to stop scrapers treat a customer's agent the same way. The fix is to verify the agent and let real ones through, while still stopping the rest.
Checklist: five checks before Black Friday
Run these before November 27. Each takes under an hour, and none needs a developer.
- Check your robots.txt. Make sure search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) and assistants (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User) are allowed. Use the free robots.txt checker.
- Show price and stock as text. Agents read words, not images. Put price, sizes, and availability in the page text, not only in pictures or pop-ups.
- Match your feed to your pages. If you send a product feed, keep prices and stock identical to the site. A mismatch makes the agent distrust both.
- Walk your own checkout as an agent would. Ask ChatGPT or Claude to find a product on your store and add it to a cart. Note every place it stalls: a CAPTCHA, a pop-up, a forced account sign-up.
- Watch who arrives. Track which agents visit in the two weeks before the sale, and whether each one is real. Price scrapers want your sale prices too.
Questions
Do I need a product feed to sell through ChatGPT?
No. A feed helps, but agents also find products through AI search and live visits. Feed onboarding is limited to approved partners today.
Will letting agents in make me easier to scrape?
Only if you let in every bot that uses a famous name. Verify each agent against its operator's published list, then let the real ones in and stop the rest.
Can an agent pay on my site?
Browser-based agents fill your normal checkout today, with the customer's approval. Newer payment standards let agents pay directly. The [glossary](/resources/glossary) covers ACP, AP2, and x402.
How do I know if agents are buying from me?
People who click through from AI answers show in analytics as referrals from sites like chatgpt.com. Agent visits that don't run your analytics script need request-level tracking. The [measurement guide](/resources/guides/measure-ai-traffic) covers both.
Sources
- Agentic Commerce: Get started, OpenAI
- Overview of OpenAI crawlers, OpenAI
- US holiday shopping forecast, Adobe, Sept 28, 2026