Where platforms get products from
Each assistant has its own path from a product page to an answer. Below is only what the platforms themselves have written; every page was read on 6 November 2026.
ChatGPT. OpenAI's shopping help page says product results are selected by ChatGPT itself, are not ads, and are not influenced by partnerships. The data comes from structured metadata "from first-party and third-party providers" and directly from merchants. For shops on Shopify the catalogue is already connected and nothing needs doing. Everyone else can submit a direct feed: the merchants page takes applications, those already submitted sit on a waitlist, and the getting-started guide says plainly that feed onboarding is currently available to approved partners. The same page: "Shopping is currently live for ChatGPT users in the U.S.", with expansion to other regions planned. In the feed specification a standard upload targets the US, and other markets require separate confirmation from OpenAI. There are no fees on purchases that start in ChatGPT; the standalone Instant Checkout is being wound down.
Google. Merchant Center supports Ukraine with the hryvnia, and the Shopping tab is available to Ukrainian users. Free listings are on by default for new accounts, and products from them may appear in Search, Images, Lens, YouTube and Gemini. The help page on AI features in Search says there are no additional requirements and no special markup for AI Overviews and AI Mode: the same indexing rules as for ordinary Search, plus the advice to keep Merchant Center data up to date. The specific shopping features of AI Mode were announced for the US, and the AI performance report in Merchant Center is available only to accounts in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the US, and only for English-language queries.
Copilot. Microsoft Advertising's agentic commerce page explains that organic product answers in Copilot use "both information found on the web and from a merchant's feed in the Microsoft Merchant Center". The feed "primarily enables discovery". But the list of countries where Shopping campaigns and Merchant Center itself operate, in Microsoft's documentation, does not include Ukraine: Moldova, Georgia and Poland are there, Ukraine is not. Copilot Checkout is only for English-language merchants selling to US buyers in dollars.
Perplexity. The merchant programme is free, aimed at "large retailers" and works through an application form; according to the help centre product recommendations are determined by the algorithm on relevance and ratings, a place cannot be bought, and purchasing itself is available "to all users in the United States".
What a Ukrainian shop can reach
✓ in the documentation without conditions · ≈ with restrictions · ✗ absent or unavailable for Ukraine. Sources are in the text above.
The conclusion from the table is simple. The only channel where a Ukrainian shop submits products directly and without an application today is Google. Everything else, for a shop selling in Ukraine, is either closed or works only through ordinary indexing of the site: the assistant will read the product page itself if its crawler is not blocked, but will not take a feed from you.
Checklist from the documentation
This is not "AI optimisation" but a list of requirements from the platforms' help pages. Everything here a shop can do itself or with a developer in a few days.
- Merchant Center with free listings on. Check: Marketing → Marketing methods → the "Free listings" card. Required feed attributes per the help page: id, title, link, image_link, price, description, availability; for some products also GTIN or MPN, brand, and for apparel colour and size.
- The feed price matches the page and the checkout. The price attribute must match the price on the product page and at checkout, in the currency of the target country; "view price in cart" is not allowed. A mismatch means the product is disapproved.
- Availability is updated when the product sells out. OpenAI's specification requires availability with one of five values (in_stock, out_of_stock, pre_order, backorder, unknown) and asks for the feed to be updated as soon as an item sells out; Google the same, through daily feed updates.
- Product markup with an Offer on the product page. Per Google's merchant listing help, price and priceCurrency are required, and availability, itemCondition, shippingDetails and hasMerchantReturnPolicy are recommended. Feed and markup together "maximise eligibility": if the page has no price, Google may take it from the feed.
- AI search crawlers are not blocked. OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT's search answers; sites that opt out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers". PerplexityBot is the same for Perplexity. Blocking GPTBot (model training) does not affect search: these are separate settings. For Google the ordinary Googlebot rules are enough.
- AI descriptions and AI photos are labelled in the feed. Merchant Center's rules on generated text and images are covered in the articles on AI product descriptions and on AI product photos: the description goes in structured_description with a label, the photo carries an IPTC tag in the file.
- Return and shipping terms are filled in. The free listings help page asks for return information in Merchant Center and for shipping to be set up; in markup that is hasMerchantReturnPolicy and shippingDetails. ChatGPT shows the buyer the return window if the merchant has provided it.
- OpenAI's nine required fields are ready in case the application is approved: item_id, title, description, url, brand, seller_name, image_url, availability, price. Price format is "79.99 USD", currency in capitals. Product pages and images must open without a login.
What the shop controls, what the platform decides
| Question | Shop controls | Platform decides |
|---|---|---|
| Whether the product is in the platform's database | Feed in Merchant Center, Product markup, crawler access | Whether to index the product and when to refresh it: Google does not guarantee a listing even when every requirement is met |
| Whether the product is shown in an answer | Completeness of fields: price, availability, brand, GTIN, specifications, reviews on the page | ChatGPT selects by "relevance to your intent" taking Memory and custom instructions into account; "not all available products will necessarily be shown" |
| What the title and description will be | The text in the feed and on the page | ChatGPT "may generate simplified product titles and descriptions" from third-party data; labels such as "Budget-friendly" or "Most popular" are set by the model and are not verified |
| Which price is shown | Keeping price and sale_price current in the feed | In ChatGPT the price in the first answer "typically reflects the price from the first merchant listed, which may not be the lowest"; price updates arrive with a delay |
| In which country it is shown | Nothing | Shopping in ChatGPT and Perplexity is for US users; Google's AI shopping features were announced for the US; Copilot Checkout is US, USD |
| Who else is listed beside you | Nothing | After a product is selected, ChatGPT shows other merchants of the same item, ranked by availability, price, quality and whether the seller is the maker |
| Whether there are ads | Nothing | OpenAI and Perplexity say product results are not ads; Copilot shows "results from across the web and from advertisers", with sponsored ones labelled |
| Whether there is a report | Nothing | Google: the AI performance report in 5 countries only; Search Console counts clicks from AI Overviews in overall web traffic with no separate filter |
The right-hand column is the answer to the promise "we'll get you into ChatGPT". Everything anyone charges for sits in the left-hand one: feed, markup, robots.txt. That is a few days of work, not a subscription.
How to check whether a product is already being shown
There is no guaranteed tool for Ukraine, so the check is made of four partial ones.
- Ask the assistant as a buyer would. Five to ten queries with the category, the brand and a price ("wireless headphones under UAH 3,000 with delivery in Ukraine"), separately in ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, in a fresh chat without history. Record whether your product and your domain appear among the sources. This is the same measurement as in the article on checking visibility in AI search, only with product queries.
- Search Console → Shopping → Merchant listings. The report shows which pages with Product markup passed validation and which have errors. If there is no Shopping section, Google sees no valid merchant listing markup on the site.
- Merchant Center → Products → diagnostics. Disapproved products do not reach AI answers, just as they do not reach Search. The "AI performance" tab under Analytics will not appear for a Ukrainian account: it is for five countries only.
- Server logs by User-Agent string. If OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot appear in the logs, the assistants are reading the product pages. If they are absent for months, check robots.txt and the CDN rules: per Google's help page, blocking at the CDN or hosting level is a typical reason a page does not reach AI features.
Our position
A shop selling in Ukraine should do three things from the checklist and not pay for a fourth: run Merchant Center with a complete feed, keep Product markup with price and availability on every product page, and not block OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. That covers every channel where the platforms take data from a Ukrainian shop at all. A "ChatGPT placement" subscription is not worth buying: shopping in ChatGPT works only for US users, a direct feed is granted on application with a waitlist, and no contractor controls anything in the right-hand column of the table above.
This position does not hold if you sell to buyers in the US in dollars. Then the application for a direct OpenAI feed, Perplexity's merchant programme and Microsoft Merchant Center become working channels, and for a shop on Shopify the catalogue is already connected in ChatGPT without an application.
Checked on 6 November 2026 against OpenAI's help page on shopping in ChatGPT, OpenAI's merchants page, OpenAI's product feed specification and getting-started guide, OpenAI's crawler documentation, Google Merchant Center help pages (supported countries, free listings, the price attribute, AI performance insights), Google Search Central documentation on AI features and merchant listing markup, Microsoft Advertising's agentic commerce page and Microsoft Advertising documentation on Shopping campaigns, Perplexity's blog post on the merchant programme, Perplexity's shopping help page and Perplexity's crawler documentation. No impression measurements of our own were made.