By Julia Waldow
Publication Date: 2026-01-05 05:00:00
2025 showed that more shoppers were eager and willing to start their shopping journeys on AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Estimates vary, but surveys show that anywhere from 33% to 83% of respondents used AI to do their holiday shopping, including soliciting product recommendations. Now, 2026 will be the year that proves whether shoppers have gotten comfortable enough with the technology to click “buy” within these AI platforms.
This will be the first full year that shoppers can actually complete transactions within these engines, without having to pay extra for access. ChatGPT, an initiative of OpenAI, has spent the last few months inking checkout deals with all types of companies, from Target to Etsy to Walmart to Instacart. This fall, Shopify also began letting merchants like Skims and Glossier enable checkout in ChatGPT through a function called Instant Checkout. Perplexity, for its part, started offering AI checkout in 2024, but only for Perplexity Pro users; in 2025, it opened this up to all U.S. users and kicked off a partnership with PayPal.
It’s still early innings for AI-powered checkout. For the most part, customers checking out natively on these platforms can only buy one product at a time. They can’t immediately link their loyalty programs or get loyalty points for purchases. Brands don’t get much first-party insight into how customers are shopping for their products on these engines. And they often don’t know who these shoppers are….
