Surfaces · Search-grounded answers

How ChatGPT reads your catalog

ChatGPT answers shopping questions by grounding them in live web search, then reading the pages it finds. It sees your store the way a crawler does — the rendered page and its structured data — not the way a shopper does.

What it ranks on

• Crawler access — GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot must be allowed in robots.txt.
• Complete JSON-LD on product pages, with offers, price, availability and brand.
• Confirmable identifiers (GTIN / MPN) so the item can be matched with certainty.
• Titles and descriptions that answer the buyer's actual question.

What breaks

• robots.txt turns the crawlers away — nothing can be read.
• Product data lives only in JavaScript the crawler doesn't execute.
• No barcode or part number, so the model can't confirm what the item is.
• Thin titles that omit the brand or model the buyer typed.