How do you get your products to show up in ChatGPT and other AI assistants?

First: there is nothing to submit

The most common version of this question assumes there is a registration step — a merchant centre, a feed upload, a partner form. For ChatGPT product recommendations there is not. Results are organic and unsponsored, ranked on relevance to what the shopper asked, and there is currently no way to pay for placement.

That is unusual and probably temporary; every prior discovery surface eventually grew an advertising layer. It also means the work described below is the only lever there is, and that authority built now costs less than advertising bought later.

The one thing that functions like a submission is protocol-level participation — ACP feeds, which large retailers including Target, Sephora, Nordstrom and Best Buy adopted on the discovery side. That is an engineering integration rather than a form, and for most merchants it is not the first move.

The four things that actually decide it

In descending order of how much they weigh, and inversely to how much control you have — which is an uncomfortable but accurate ordering.

Start with the test that predicts most of it

Before changing anything, fetch one of your own product pages the way a crawler does — without executing JavaScript — and check whether four things survive in the raw HTML: the price, the availability state, the variant identity, and a stable identifier such as a SKU or GTIN.

If any of those only appear after client-side rendering, an assistant evaluating your product is guessing or skipping it. This is not a rare edge case: Adobe measured retail product pages scoring 66% on machine readability, the lowest of any page type, while AI-sourced traffic to those sites grew 393% year over year.

That gap is the opportunity. Most of your competitors have not closed it either.

Accuracy matters more than completeness

A common failure is treating this as a markup exercise and shipping schema that asserts values the page no longer honours — a stale price, in-stock on a sold-out variant.

That is worse than no markup. It produces confident wrong answers, which is precisely how a source becomes one an assistant learns not to rely on, and for Google rich results it risks a structured-data penalty. Generate the markup from the same source the storefront renders from, never by hand and never from a nightly export.

The subscription-specific version of this trap: upcoming renewals are committed inventory. A stock count that does not reserve against them will advertise units you cannot ship.

The part you cannot buy your way out of

Brand-owned sites account for roughly 5–10% of the sources AI search draws on. Affiliate content, publishers and user-generated content exceed 65% in key categories.

So the honest ceiling on everything above is that it makes you verifiable and citable once something else has surfaced you — it does not surface you by itself. The remaining work is being genuinely reviewed, covered and discussed: real product reviews on third-party sites, coverage in publications your category reads, presence in the communities where your buyers compare options.

Do not manufacture it. Planted reviews and paid placement dressed as editorial are detectable, and the downside is being treated as an unreliable source — a materially worse position than being unknown, because it is harder to recover from.

A realistic order of work

Ordered so each step is useful on its own and none is wasted if a particular protocol fails to win.

• 1. Run the JavaScript-disabled test on a product page, a collection page and your search results. Fix what does not survive. This is the largest measured gap and it improves classical SEO simultaneously.
• 2. Add schema.org Product markup generated from your live catalog, with real price, availability and identifiers.
• 3. Publish the discovery layer — robots.txt admitting assistant crawlers, a sitemap, an llms.txt generated rather than hand-written.
• 4. Make your brand facts consistent everywhere they appear. Inconsistency is resolved by omission more often than by picking a side.
• 5. Invest in third-party presence. This is the largest factor and the slowest, which is why it should start now rather than after the technical work is perfect.
• 6. Consider protocol integration — ACP feeds, UCP — once the above is done and if your volume justifies tracking a moving specification.