Catalog Wants to Make Your Products Visible to ChatGPT Before Your Competitors Are

Quick Facts

AI-referred traffic to U.S. retail sites rose 393% year-over-year in Q1 2026 and converts 42% better than other traffic sources, per Adobe Analytics.
Only 20% of merchants have machine-readable catalogs, even as 95% already see AI agent traffic on their sites.
Products with 8 or more structured attributes get cited 4.3x more often in AI recommendations than those with minimal data.

A startup called Catalog is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer between retail product catalogs and AI shopping tools, as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude become active channels for product discovery and purchase decisions.

The company describes itself as “the product data layer for AI commerce.” Its pitch is simple: AI recommends the products it understands best, and most retailer product data was never built for AI to read.

The Problem Catalog Is Solving

Most product catalogs were built for human shoppers browsing web pages. AI agents read structured data. That gap is costing retailers visibility.

Catalog identifies three specific failure points. First, missing attributes: no material, fit, or use-case context that AI weighs before making a recommendation. Second, poor structure: AI cannot distinguish between sizes, colors, and bundles without it. Third, distribution: the feeds and protocols AI agents shop through do not pull from standard retail websites, so brands never enter the consideration set.

Once a retailer’s data flows into Catalog’s system, the company normalizes, resolves, verifies, and structures it, then publishes it across every protocol AI agents use to make purchases. It also tracks which products are being recommended and which are being skipped across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity sessions.

Why the Timing Matters

ChatGPT now has 700 million weekly active users. Adobe Analytics recorded a 1,950% year-over-year increase in retail site traffic from AI-driven chat during Cyber Monday 2024. In Q1 2026, AI-referred traffic to U.S. retail sites rose 393% year-over-year and converted 42% better than other sources.

During Black Friday 2025, shoppers arriving at Amazon from ChatGPT converted at 1.7x the rate of Google-referred shoppers and spent 11% more per order. Similarweb data puts ChatGPT referral traffic conversion at 7.1%, behind only paid search at 7.8%.

The gap between traffic opportunity and retailer readiness is wide. A May 2026 panel at Consensus Miami surfaced fresh survey data showing 95% of merchants already see AI agent traffic on their sites, but only 20% have machine-readable catalogs. Most product catalogs score between 30% and 60% on attribute completeness. Only 16% of brands track their AI search performance systematically.

The Broader Infrastructure Taking Shape

OpenAI launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol, or ACP, to support product discovery inside ChatGPT. Target, Walmart, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe’s, and Wayfair have already integrated their product catalogs directly through ACP. Shopify and Etsy merchants are automatically included through existing catalog integrations with no additional setup required.

OpenAI also supports delivery through third-party providers including Salesforce and Stripe.

“We’re in the early days of AI commerce in general and agentic commerce,” Mahak Sharma, product partnerships at OpenAI, told Retail Brew. “It takes time to change user behavior and do it in a way that the technology completely supports it.”

What Retailers Need to Know

Eighty-three percent of ChatGPT’s shopping carousel data comes from Google Shopping feeds, meaning retailers with strong Google Shopping investments already have a head start. But 68% of AI citations come from third-party sources, not brand-owned websites, which means external review presence on Amazon, Google, and category platforms matters more than polished owned content alone.

For brands not on Shopify or Etsy, and without direct ACP integrations, structured product data distribution remains a manual problem. That is the opening Catalog is building toward.