OpenAI expands its advertising in ChatGPT with new product carousel ads, enabling retailers to showcase multiple items at once and fostering a more visual, commerce-oriented chat environment ahead of the holiday season.
OpenAI has widened its advertising push in ChatGPT by introducing product carousel ads, a format that lets a single retailer show several items in one sponsored placement. The move builds on its product feed campaigns and comes as the company pushes harder into commerce ahead of the holiday shopping season. According to the report from The Technology Express, the new format is designed to make shopping in ChatGPT more visual and more useful, while giving merchants broader exposure for their catalogues.
Until now, sponsored listings in ChatGPT showed one product at a time, alongside an image, description and link. The carousel changes that by placing multiple related products side by side at the bottom of relevant conversations, allowing users to compare items without leaving the chat. That makes the experience closer to a compact shopping shelf embedded in the conversation, rather than a single paid recommendation.
The system is tied to OpenAI’s product feed infrastructure, which was introduced earlier this year. Retailers can upload full catalogues instead of building individual ads item by item, and ChatGPT then generates product-based campaigns from that structured data. Shopifreaks reported that the approach is meant to streamline campaign creation and keep product details current, while also enabling large catalogues to be handled at scale.
OpenAI does not appear to let advertisers choose the format manually. Instead, the platform decides whether to show a single product or a carousel based on the conversation and its own ad-serving systems. That makes the product feed system more automated than a conventional retail media buy, with the model determining which presentation is most suitable for an eligible query.
The carousel is part of a broader monetisation strategy that OpenAI has been building through 2026. Search Engine Journal reported that the company began testing ads in ChatGPT for Free and Go users in the United States, with paid tiers such as Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education remaining ad-free. Those ads are labelled as sponsored, are not shown in sensitive topics such as health, mental health or politics and are not displayed to accounts identified as under 18. OpenAI has also said advertisers do not get access to private conversations. The company’s latest retail format suggests it wants ChatGPT to become a more serious shopping destination, while keeping its advertising products framed as clearly separated from the assistant’s answers.
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