ChatGPT Atlas is here – and it can handle shopping all on its own. Alarm bells should be ringing for ecommerce teams. Will this spell revolution for the way we shop online?

Last week, ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI launched a new, agentic browser to rival competitors like Google. 

The new browser is currently available on Apple’s MacOS operating system, and is in development for Windows and Android. 

What is ChatGPT Atlas?

allows users to browse the internet with ChatGPT on-hand as a personal assistant, research tool, and co-creator. 

Pull up a chat panel at any time when viewing a webpage, and ChatGPT will automatically understand the context of what you’re looking at. 

As you use Atlas, ChatGPT will learn more about you, your interests and behaviours. If you let Atlas remember your web browsing, ChatGPT can retrieve webpages you’ve read in the past, even if you don’t remember more than the general topic. 

To put that in perspective, a user could ask, “Can you find those red shoes I was looking at last week?”. Within seconds, ChatGPT Atlas can offer up the webpage in question.

Why does ChatGPT Atlas matter for ecommerce? 

For ecommerce teams, ChatGPT Atlas’ Agent Mode should ring alarm bells. Is this the start of a revolution in the way we buy things online? 

When Agent Mode is enabled, ChatGPT Atlas can – in theory – autonomously open tabs, click through pages, book hotels and flights… and even shop. While the human user continues browsing elsewhere, or even walks away from the screen entirely, ChatGPT can visit ecommerce sites, add products to basket, and purchase items autonomously. 

Over the past few months, OpenAI has been doubling-down on online retail, forming Nevertheless, ChatGPT Atlas’ ecommerce use-case goes one step further than everything we’ve seen before. 

, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman asked ChatGPT to read a recipe and order the ingredients for eight people. 

Now, in the week since the browser’s release, a number of articles are already cropping up in which the intrepid authors set ChatGPT loose on their own grocery shopping. 

The verdict? Even in this first iteration, ChatGPT Atlas is full of potential – and with a few snags ironed out (), it could very well be the future of shopping online. 

, suggested the tool would be “awesome to use around the holidays… I’m planning to ask it to find the hottest toys for 4-year-olds… filter by best sellers and reviews, stick to a budget, and fill out my cart automatically… It could save me hours of gift-hunting – or at least inspire a few great present ideas.”

How to optimise for ChatGPT Atlas 

, more than 800 million people already use ChatGPT every week for help with everyday tasks, up from 400 million in February.

If even a fraction of these users start using agentic AI to shop, the way ecommerce teams win conversions could end up looking very, very different. 

Instead of manually navigating to your website, browsing categories, filtering, clicking, and so on, future shoppers might leave it to Atlas to access ecommerce sites at all. 

As ChatGPT Atlas’ userbase grows, teams should expect a shift in traditional web traffic from search engines. 

Rather than taking shoppers to your online store, ChatGPT Atlas pulls your product data into its own UI.

With fewer brand touchpoints, there will be fewer opportunities to nurture shoppers with discounts, pop-ups, or up-selling at checkout. Email subscriptions might also see a drop. 

While a human might be swayed by a brightly coloured banner or well-placed urgency cues, AI primarily uses product metadata to decide which products to recommend. This makes your on-page product content like descriptions, titles and specs the new star of the show. 

You’ll need to make sure this content is optimised for AI search, or run the risk of losing traffic to competitors. Any Digital Marketer knows the struggle of running a modern social media account at the whim of the explore page algorithm – and with AI search, ecommerce teams face a similar problem. Beautiful, on-brand copy is wasted if AI tools never recommend your products to customers. Ecommerce teams must balance brand voice with optimisation for AI agents. 

For example, to ensure your products show up in ChatGPT Atlas, it’s best practice for copy to reference common conversational queries. When a user asks ChatGPT for help finding a warm winter coat, ChatGPT is – logically enough – most likely to recommend coats that reference winter in their description.

Brands and retailers that adopt agentic-friendly practices early on stand to reap the biggest rewards from a shift towards AI browsers. If you wait until agentic shopping goes mainstream, unfortunately, you may find you’re playing catch-up in the long run.  

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