We expected ChatGPT's shopping answers to vary by product category. They barely do. What they vary by is how the question is phrased — and the variation is not cosmetic. Different phrasings produce different buy links, pointing at different kinds of pages, owned by different companies.
Across 28 shopping prompts run in a signed-out Chrome window on 21 October 2026, we counted 11 distinct display formats. Nine of them are below, each paired with the prompt that produced it.
Key takeaways
- 28 prompts, 11 display formats. The prompt, not the category, decides which one you get.
- The default is an inline list with a text buy link — 18 of 28 runs.
- Asking for "product cards with prices and buy buttons" produces black buy buttons, which usually carry
utm_medium=feed— meaning the destination came from a merchant catalogue. - Asking for official links moves the buy link from a retailer to the brand's own site, though not always to a product page.
- Asking to compare merchant prices produces a quote table — and tends to surface category and search-results pages rather than product pages.
- Repeating the same question does not reliably give the same answer: one tracking study found the top-recommended brand changed between adjacent weeks 56.4% of the time.
The nine formats
Reading that grid as a practitioner, four things stand out.
The default is a text link, not a button. Eighteen of 28 runs produced the plain inline list with a "Shop at …" line. If you are modelling what most shoppers see, model this.
Buttons mean feed. When we explicitly asked for product cards and buy buttons, the answers rendered full-width black buttons — and those URLs disproportionately carried utm_medium=feed, meaning the destination came from a submitted product catalogue rather than a crawled page. The display format and the data source are correlated. See the ChatGPT product feed.
Comparison prompts dilute the destination. The merchant price table looks like the most commercially useful format and produces some of the weakest links: in our AirPods Pro 3 comparison, two rows opened retailer category pages and one opened a search results page.
