Selling through ChatGPT and Google: getting a PrestaShop or WooCommerce store ready

AI compares, then points the way

Since 2025, ChatGPT has shown products in its answers, and since March 2026 it has displayed them side by side, with price, reviews and features. OpenAI states that these results are chosen by ChatGPT itself: they are not ads, and no partnership influences them.

Google’s AI Overviews (the AI-written summary at the top of the results) and AI Mode (a search you conduct like a conversation) launched in France, in French, on 22 July 2026. For products, Google relies in particular on the information merchants send it through Merchant Center, its tool for retailers, and on what it reads on their store pages.

What these tools cannot yet do in France is take payment. OpenAI launched in-chat checkout in September 2025, in the United States only, then scaled it back in March 2026: purchases are now completed on the merchant’s own website, with no commission. In France, Carrefour already works this way: since March 2026, shoppers can build their grocery cart in ChatGPT, then pay on the retailer’s website.

Google’s AI checkout started in the United States and is now extending to Canada and Australia, with the UK to follow; nothing has been announced for France. Microsoft’s checkout in Copilot, launched in January 2026, is likewise limited for now to merchants selling to US customers, in English and in dollars.

For a store selling in France, everything therefore happens upstream: making it onto the AI’s shortlist, then welcoming a customer who arrives having already compared the options.

And shoppers are following: according to Fevad, the French e-commerce federation, 31% of French online shoppers already use generative AI when shopping online (February 2026). For online stores, the shift is only beginning: according to the Autorité de la concurrence, France’s competition authority (July 2026), AI assistants currently send less than 5% of the traffic reaching e-commerce websites, a share that could reach 20 to 25% by 2030.

Take a store that sells an organic olive oil from Provence. A customer asks ChatGPT for “an organic olive oil from Provence in a 50 cl bottle, delivered within 48 hours, under €30”. If the listing is called “Summer’s Treasure” and mentions neither the origin nor the delivery time, the AI cannot tell that it matches: it recommends a better-described one instead.

What AI actually reads: your product data

An AI does not look at your store the way a customer does. It does not linger over the design or the slogans: it reads data, and compares specific products. The same information appears in OpenAI’s requirements and in Google’s:

For the barcode, there is one rule: never make it up. It is better to leave it out than to enter an approximate number, which would match your product with someone else’s. A product you make yourself, without a barcode, is identified by its brand and its own product code.

Two ways in: Merchant Center and the crawlers

For Google, the way in is Merchant Center. Once your catalogue is connected, Google has your products, prices and stock levels, which it can use in its results as well as its AI answers.

Note, though, that since mid-September 2026, to comply with the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), Google no longer shows non-paid product listings from Merchant Center in the European Economic Area, which includes France. Instead, it can show a block of comparison services and, alongside it, the pages of sellers its crawler has explored. Product pages that are easy for that crawler to read therefore matter all the more.

There is no need to copy anything by hand: the official Google for WooCommerce extension, which costs nothing, and the official PrestaShop Marketing with Google module, which comes with a monthly subscription, both synchronise the catalogue automatically. Google also recommends describing each product in the page’s code, known as “structured data”: together, the two give Google the best chance of understanding your products correctly.

Since May 2026, Merchant Center has also accepted six pieces of information designed for conversations with an AI: questions and answers about the product; related products, such as accessories or spare parts; PDF documents, such as the instructions; the shared name of a product’s variants; the options that set each variant apart; and the product’s popularity within your catalogue. All of them are optional and still new: filling them in now gives you a head start.

Sending your catalogue directly to ChatGPT works by application to OpenAI, with a waiting list, and for now it only serves shoppers in the United States. A store selling in France therefore comes in through the other door: ChatGPT discovers your products by reading your website’s pages, through its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot (a crawler is a program that browses websites automatically).

OpenAI is clear: a website that blocks it does not appear in ChatGPT’s search answers. Its other crawler, GPTBot, is used to train the models: you can block it without losing your place in ChatGPT. For the content of your pages, see my guide to appearing in ChatGPT and AI answers.

PrestaShop and WooCommerce: where each one stands

Both platforms are moving on two fronts that should not be confused: AI that helps the merchant in the back office (the store’s admin area), and AI that buys on the customer’s behalf.

• PrestaShop: the official PrestaShop Marketing with Google module connects the catalogue to Merchant Center. Since November 2025, PrestaShop has also offered an official MCP server, at no cost. MCP is a protocol, meaning a shared set of rules that lets programs talk to each other; with this server, an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude or Mistral’s Vibe (formerly Le Chat) can consult the back office and act on it, to analyse sales or update product pages in plain language. PrestaShop 9.2, released on 30 September 2026, adds “Ask AI”, a built-in assistant that relies on this server. For purchases made by agents, AIs acting on behalf of customers, PrestaShop has not yet announced a date.
• WooCommerce: the official Google for WooCommerce extension connects the catalogue to Merchant Center. Since WordPress 6.9 and WooCommerce 10.3, an AI assistant can read and change the store’s products and orders through MCP; the feature is still at the testing stage and has to be switched on by a developer. For purchases made by agents, WooCommerce lists OpenAI’s and Google’s protocols as “coming soon”, and Stripe, its partner on this, has announced selling through AI agents for French businesses from late 2026.

When AI buys for the customer: what is moving forward and what is going backwards

When an AI places the order itself on the customer’s behalf, this is called agentic commerce. Two protocols, shared rules that let an AI and a store talk to each other, are competing for purchases made by AI agents: the Agentic Commerce Protocol, from OpenAI and Stripe, and the Universal Commerce Protocol, unveiled by Google in January 2026 with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, which Microsoft also uses for Copilot.

As for MCP, created by Anthropic and handed over in December 2025 to the Agentic AI Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, it is not a purchasing protocol but a general-purpose connection standard, which Google’s protocol can itself use.

On Google’s side, this protocol is already in use: since 15 October 2026, in the United States only, Universal Cart gathers products from several stores in a single cart, from AI Mode and Gemini, alerts shoppers to price drops and items back in stock, and lets them pay with Google Pay at some merchants. The store remains the seller, confirms the order and handles customer service; no date has been announced for Europe.

The ground is shifting fast, and not always in the announced direction: OpenAI itself backtracked on in-chat checkout, which by its own account lacked flexibility. Standards will keep changing; your product data, however, will be useful whichever protocol prevails.

The day an agent can place an order, or right now if you connect an assistant to your back office, one rule of caution applies: limited permissions, and human approval for anything involving money or customer data. That data remains protected by the GDPR, and in Monaco by the law of 3 December 2024 on personal data protection.

Advertising in ChatGPT: open in France, not a priority

Since late August 2026, ChatGPT has been showing ads in 31 European countries, including France, to users without a paid subscription and to those on its Go plan. Ads appear below the answer, labelled as sponsored and kept separate from product results; in the European Economic Area, they are not personalised for now. Since 31 August, a French business has been able to create its own campaigns. A company based in Monaco, however, cannot run campaigns yet: the Principality is not among the countries covered.

Should you start now? Not as a first step. An ad sends people to your product pages: if they are incomplete, you are paying to send a customer to a page that does not convince them. And campaigns built from a product catalogue also depend on clean data. Start by being properly recommended without paying for ads; advertising can then amplify what already works.

Where to start: five actions, in order

1. Let the right crawlers in. Check that your robots.txt file (the instructions your site gives to crawlers) and your firewall let OAI-SearchBot and Googlebot through. Blocking GPTBot is up to you: it does not remove you from ChatGPT.
2. Complete your product pages, starting with the ones that sell. A descriptive name, the brand, the barcode where there is one, complete variants, a factual description and sharp photos. Merchant Center will also require images of at least 500 pixels per side from 31 January 2027.
3. Connect the store to Merchant Center. Use your platform’s official extension, so that prices and stock update themselves. Then enter your delivery and returns terms and, for your best sellers, the new conversational attributes.
4. Check the structured data. The code of each product page must describe the product, its price and its availability, and say exactly the same thing as the page; delivery and returns can be declared once for the whole store.
5. Measure. In your analytics, isolate visits coming from chatgpt.com and other assistants: how many there are, which pages they land on, what they order. Microsoft Clarity, an analytics tool, even groups them separately for you. That will tell you when to go further.

Can AI read your store?

I design and develop PrestaShop and WooCommerce stores for businesses in Monaco and on the French Riviera. To prepare yours for AI shopping, I start with a quantified review of what AI can read: how many product pages have a barcode, complete variants and a factual description, which crawlers get through or are blocked, what the structured data says, and the connection with Merchant Center.

Then I fix things, starting with what pays off most, and you approve every change on a test version of your store before it goes live. I also tell you what can wait, such as AI checkout, until it opens in France. You talk directly to the person who writes the code.

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Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Powering product discovery in ChatGPT (OpenAI, March 2026)
• OpenAI crawlers: OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot (OpenAI)
• AI Overviews and AI Mode launch in France (Google, July 2026)
• The French and AI for online shopping (Fevad, February 2026)
• AI agents and competition (Autorité de la concurrence, July 2026)