ChatGPT has declared WAR on Google

Google’s grip on search has looked untouchable for two decades. Its ad machine thrives on one thing above all: people typing “top,” “best,” or “near me” and clicking through to a purchase. That transactional funnel is the most valuable real estate on the internet. And up until this week, ChatGPT had barely scratched it.

Yes, GPT has been gaining ground in overall market share. The trend has been clear for two years: every quarter, Google drifts lower while GPT ticks higher.

But when you carve out transactional searches only—the lifeblood of Google’s $175 billion ad empire—the picture has looked much safer for Google. GPT was making less of a dent.

That changed yesterday.

OpenAI announced in-app shopping inside ChatGPT. For the first time, users can ask GPT for product ideas, get personalized recommendations, and buy the item without ever touching Google or Amazon.

When a user asks ChatGPT for a product—“running shoes under $150,” “best travel mug,” “birthday gifts for a six-year-old”—it now returns specific items from real merchants and lets the buyer complete the purchase inside the chat with no links, no extra clicks, and no reentering payment details.

For merchants, fulfillment stays the same. The order lands in the existing Shopify or Etsy dashboard for inventory, shipping, and support, since ChatGPT passes the order using a standard it built with Stripe.

At launch, the feature covers U.S. Etsy sellers and will soon extend to more than one million Shopify storefronts, including well-known brands like Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori. That means millions of items are instantly available inside ChatGPT, from handmade crafts to mainstream fashion. For now, purchases are limited to a single item at a time, but OpenAI has confirmed that multi-item carts and international expansion are on the roadmap.

Merchants who participate pay OpenAI a small fee on each transaction, but product prices for buyers stay the same. OpenAI also says that items available for Instant Checkout are not automatically given top placement. Instead, availability of the feature is one of many factors—alongside things like price, quality, and stock levels—that influence which products the assistant surfaces.

That said, the writing is already on the wall.

While OpenAI insists products with Instant Checkout won’t be artificially boosted, companies will have every incentive to integrate their catalogs into ChatGPT as quickly as possible. No merchant wants to risk being invisible at the point of sale, especially when consumers are presented with side-by-side options. In practice, the marketplace will move toward a world where “if you’re not in GPT’s catalog, you don’t exist to the customer.”

The obvious next step is advertising. It is hard to imagine merchants not pushing for promoted placement once they see conversion rates inside GPT.

History shows how this unfolds. Facebook and Instagram introduced shopping integrations years ago that made it possible to purchase items without leaving the app.

Within a short period, those integrations unlocked billions in new ad revenue. Social media ad spend overtook search ad spend in 2023.

Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping ads reached a $20 billion annual run-rate by late 2024 before the company began phasing out native checkout in mid-2025, an experiment worth watching closely as OpenAI attempts to execute the same model with Stripe and Shopify at its core.

It also raises the question of which platforms may plug into this ecosystem.

Pinterest, for example, already thrives as a product discovery engine, but its conversion funnel has long depended on kicking users out to external sites. If Pinterest were to integrate directly with ChatGPT’s commerce layer, its catalogs could gain new reach inside the chat interface while finally fixing its historically weak checkout experience.

For investors, the stakes go far beyond transaction fees. The real battle will be in ad dollars. Google earns the majority of its advertising revenue from transactional search queries, the same territory GPT is now entering.

If even a single-digit percentage of those dollars start to shift toward GPT-native ads, the financial impact will be enormous.

Meta and TikTok proved that once brands see higher conversion per dollar, they move budgets aggressively. The same reallocation will be critical to watch here.

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