Profound: ChatGPT Shopping recommendations from product feeds jumped to 61.54% in a day

ChatGPT Shopping now takes about 65% of its product recommendations from merchant product feeds, according to Profound. The share was 8.26% before July 10, 2026, and jumped to 61.54% in a single day. A product feed is a file with a store’s items, prices and descriptions that the store sends to ChatGPT. Feeds overtook web search as the main source of recommendations in August.

Profound sells tools that track how AI assistants mention brands, so this is a vendor report rather than an independent audit. It published the study on September 3. The daily analysis covered 1,757,723 tracked prompt runs in July, a 50% sample. A separate study of concentration used 33,167 prompt runs from July 7 to 12.

Top 10 stores took 41.8% of ChatGPT Shopping references after July 10

The shift concentrated recommendations among fewer, larger merchants. Profound compared July 7 to 9 with July 10 to 12. Of 687 tracked merchants, 450 lost at least 33% of their Shopping visibility, while 67 gained a comparable amount. The top 10 stores’ share of references rose from 22.5% to 41.8%. The number of unique merchants that ChatGPT cited fell from 13,524 to 10,607, a drop of more than 20%.

The shift came one day after OpenAI released GPT-5.6

The jump happened on July 10, one day after OpenAI released GPT-5.6. Profound’s regression model explains 83% of the visibility changes it observed. OpenAI has not confirmed any link between the new model and the Shopping change, Elsop reports. The company had extended its Agentic Commerce Protocol, the system that lets ChatGPT work with merchants, to product discovery on March 24. A further model, GPT-6 Astra, began rolling out to a limited set of organizations on September 3.

Shopify stores hold about 35% of feed-based retrieval

Stores hosted on Shopify account for roughly 35% of all feed-integrated retrieval, Profound says. The correlation between Shopify’s share and the feed share is 0.997. Shopify and Etsy catalogs connect to ChatGPT automatically. Other retailers must apply through a waitlist, and OpenAI has not disclosed the terms. Shopify claims that AI searches powered by its catalog convert at twice the rate of searches that use scraped data.

GA4 cannot yet isolate ChatGPT Shopping sessions

Measuring the effect on sales remains hard. Elsop notes that the “AI Assistant” channel in Google Analytics 4 cannot separate sessions that came from a shopping answer from other ChatGPT visits. So a merchant can see visibility rise or fall in a tool like Profound’s, but cannot yet tie it to revenue in its own analytics.

For marketers, the first step is to check whether the store has a product feed connected to ChatGPT at all. Merchants on Shopify or Etsy are already in. Everyone else should join OpenAI’s waitlist now and keep the feed data accurate, because feed content is what ChatGPT reads. Treat Profound’s numbers as a signal of direction, not as a sales measurement.