OpenAI has pinned a Shopping tab to the permanent left sidebar of ChatGPT, moving product search out of prompt-only territory and into standing navigation. Search Engine Roundtable reported the change on August 27, citing a screenshot that OpenAI itself labeled “new.” The stakes are about placement: sidebar real estate is the scarcest space in any chat interface, and ChatGPT just spent a slot of it on shopping.
The tab currently applies to users in the European Union. Selecting it opens a dedicated landing page and a search experience built around product discovery, separate from typing a shopping query into the main chat window. Visual search works inside the tab. In-app checkout does not exist yet, so shoppers still have to leave ChatGPT to complete a purchase.
That distinction matters more than the tab itself. A sidebar slot signals durable product strategy rather than a feature tucked behind a settings toggle or an in-chat suggestion. Google spent years testing shopping surfaces inside Search before making them permanent fixtures. OpenAI is skipping that ambiguous middle step and treating shopping as a first-class ChatGPT function, alongside chat history and saved projects.
The rollout was first spotted by Radu Oncescu, who posted screenshots on X noting the EU-only availability and the missing checkout flow. Barry Schwartz, writing for Search Engine Roundtable, confirmed the sidebar placement and included OpenAI’s own “new” label on the feature in his report.
OpenAI has not published a timeline for markets outside the EU. The report includes no figures on how many users have opened the tab or what share of ChatGPT sessions now carry shopping intent. That gap leaves open whether this is an early stage of a broad platform shift or a regional test that happens to look permanent, since navigation placement alone does not prove wide adoption.
For retailers, the more useful signal is not that the tab exists but where OpenAI put it. A standing sidebar entry competes for the same habitual attention that Google’s Shopping tab and Amazon’s search bar already claim, which means visibility inside ChatGPT’s dedicated shopping surface is becoming a distinct target from general answer visibility. Because checkout still routes users to merchant sites, referral tracking and landing-page conversion work remain relevant even as discovery shifts into ChatGPT’s own navigation.
Retailers already optimizing feeds for Google Shopping and Bing Shopping should start treating this ChatGPT surface as a separate channel to monitor, not folded into broader ChatGPT visibility efforts, and should watch for the tab’s expansion past the EU as the signal that it has moved from regional test to standard placement.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the ChatGPT sidebar Shopping tab on August 27, 2026.
