How do I get AI to recommend my products when people ask where to buy?

To get your products recommended by ChatGPT, give it a page on your own online store that says, as plain text, what you sell, that you make it, and how and where you deliver. In our Malaysian shopping test, ChatGPT cited store homepages and collection pages rather than single product pages, and what it repeated was delivery and ordering details, not prices.

OpenAI also takes product feeds for the product recommendations in ChatGPT's shopping results. That's a separate route, and if your store runs on Shopify, it may already be done for you.

Which page of my online store does ChatGPT recommend when shoppers ask where to buy?

In our test, ChatGPT pointed to the store, not the product page, when Malaysian shoppers asked where to buy local products. Every page it cited from a brand's own online store was a homepage, a collection or category page, or a festive promotion page. Shopee links were mostly shop pages too.

Every cited page, with business names removed: download the CSV.

Our reading: shoppers asked for shops, so it answered with shops. That's 11 citations, so it doesn't mean product pages never get cited. For service businesses, most cited pages were inner pages. For a product seller, the homepage and collection pages are the shop window.

Shopee took 30 of the 61 links in this test. Which questions went to Shopee and which to brands' own stores is a separate article.

What did ChatGPT repeat from the online stores it recommended?

ChatGPT mostly repeated delivery and ordering details from the online stores it recommended, not prices. In 8 of the 11 own-store citations, the answer passed on a delivery or how-to-buy fact from the store. None came with a price, although most of the pages we could read showed prices in RM. The questions played a part: both kuih questions asked for delivery, and they produced most of those citations.

Product schema was rare on these pages: only one of the 10 we could read had it. Delivery wording was on all 10, as text.

Does a product feed get my products into ChatGPT's shopping results?

A product feed is OpenAI's route into ChatGPT's shopping results, the product cards with pictures and prices, separate from the answers our test measured. OpenAI says ChatGPT considers "Structured metadata from first-party and third-party providers (e.g., price, product description)" when choosing products, and ranks the shops selling one item partly on whether each is "the maker or primary seller"¹ (more on that in our Shopee article).

• On Shopify: OpenAI says product data "is already integrated into ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog", with "No additional work" needed².
• On WooCommerce, EasyStore, SiteGiant or others: a direct feed is "currently available to approved partners", by application³.

When we asked ChatGPT how a Malaysian online store gets its products recommended, it called a product feed "the main path". Yet the stores it recommended in our test got there through ordinary web pages. OpenAI's help page doesn't say which countries get the product cards, and its feed documentation says the standard upload "currently targets the US"⁴. So we can't confirm a feed reaches Malaysian shoppers yet.

What should I put on my online store so ChatGPT recommends my products?

To get your products recommended, put what a shopper needs, as text, on the pages ChatGPT cited in our test: your homepage and collection pages. Keep clear product pages as well; our test can't rule them out.

1. Say what you make in the first lines of your homepage. Use shoppers' words, like "kuih raya", "sambal nasi lemak" or "baju kurung", say you're the maker, and add "halal-certified" if you are.
2. Write your delivery as a sentence. Where you post to (Semenanjung, Sabah and Sarawak), how fast, order notice and pickup. A banner image doesn't count.
3. Give each product type and festive season a collection page, with prices in RM as text. A Raya collection was what ChatGPT cited for a Raya question.
4. Check ChatGPT can read your store. Let its search crawler in and make sure your text loads without JavaScript.

What can't this test tell me about ChatGPT recommending my products?

This test shows what ChatGPT cited and repeated, not why it chose one store over another.

• One engine, a small sample. Thirteen shopping questions, mostly asked once, through OpenAI's API rather than the ChatGPT app, where OpenAI's product cards appear.
• What counts as an own store. Five free Google Sites pages about clothing brands, all in one Malay answer, weren't counted as own online stores. We read them as brand-profile pages rather than shops, and one sits on a university student account.
• Pages changed. We read the store pages four days after the answers. Shopee showed us a login page, so we couldn't read its pages.
• Answers vary. The same coffee question named different brands on its two runs.

How do I find out if ChatGPT recommends my products?

The only way to know if ChatGPT recommends your products is to ask what your shoppers ask, more than once.

1. Request EasyFound's free check. See what ChatGPT says when shoppers ask something like "Where can I order kuih raya online that can be posted to Kuching?", and whether it names your store. Then go through it with us on a free call.
2. Rewrite your homepage's first lines and delivery sentence as above.
3. Ask again in a week or two, logged out, with the same questions.

EasyFound is an AI SEO service for Malaysian businesses. We check six AI tools in English, Malay and Chinese, then fix the pages they read so your own store gets named. Start with the free check below.