We've been running early research on the ChatGPT shelf, thousands of queries acr
By Toddpie · June 21, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
We've been running early research on the ChatGPT shelf, thousands of queries across three product categories & the pattern we found is interesting.
69% of the time, there is no shopping carousel.
No product cards. No buy buttons. No images. Just a text answer recommending brands by name.
We ran queries across cookware, personal care, and sports & outdoors. Cookware queries produced a carousel only 23% of the time. personal care, 32%. sports & outdoors were the highest at 37%. The rest? Pure editorial. ChatGPT just tells you what to buy in a paragraph.
If you're thinking about the AI shelf the way you think about a Google Shopping carousel or an Amazon search results page, you're picturing the wrong thing. Most of the time, the "shelf" is a sentence.
That means the thing that determines whether your brand gets recommended isn't just your product feed, your images, or your star rating. It's whether ChatGPT's training data and web sources associate your brand with the right context.
We're running more categories this month. But the early data is clear enough: the surface brands need to win isn't a carousel. It's a paragraph.