How does a brand sell inside ChatGPT and other AI assistants?

Shoppers have started asking AI assistants what to buy. They open an assistant like ChatGPT or Gemini, describe what they need, and ask for a recommendation. The question every brand is now asking back is simple: when that happens, can my store answer, and do I still own the sale? The short answer is yes, through open protocols, and the details are worth getting right.

Here is the shape of it. Your store exposes its live catalogue over an open protocol that external assistants can reach. When a shopper asks an assistant for, say, a waterproof jacket under a set price, the assistant can query your store, surface real products from your real catalogue, and the shopper sees your answer inside the conversation. No scraping, no guessing, no stale feed. Your store speaks for itself.

The part that matters is what happens next. Instead of the purchase completing inside the assistant, where the platform owns the shopper and the data, your store hands the shopper a link to finish checkout on your own site. The recommendation happened where the shopper was. The sale, the relationship, the voice and the data come home to you. That is the difference between selling through an assistant and being sold by one.

You stay in control of how the agent behaves out there. It recommends within the catalogue you publish, negotiates only inside the floor prices you set, and follows the same rules it follows on your own storefront. Nothing high-impact happens that you did not allow, and every move it makes is logged where you can see it. Reaching a new surface should never mean loosening the rules.

This is early, and we would rather be straight with you than oversell it. The assistants are still settling how they surface independent stores, and the standards are still forming. What we can say is that the brands who own their agent now, on their own store, are the ones who will be ready to answer when the question arrives through an assistant. The alternative is to wait and hope the platform lets you in on good terms.