How to get your WooCommerce store into ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Copilot: what’s open today, what’s still an application
If you run WooCommerce, nothing puts your products into AI shopping by default the way Shopify now does for its stores. Three doors are open to you today without asking anyone: a Google Merchant Center feed for Google AI Mode and Gemini, a Microsoft Merchant Center feed for Copilot’s organic results, and letting OpenAI’s search crawler read your pages so ChatGPT search can cite them. Everything else, a product feed inside ChatGPT, a Buy button inside Google or Copilot, Perplexity’s merchant program, is an application form in October 2026. The one shortcut, Shopify’s Agentic plan, works by moving your AI orders into a Shopify admin. That trade is worth seeing clearly before you sign up.
My last two posts were about which AI channels check out Shopify products. Every rule in them starts with “for eligible Shopify stores”. So I went back to the primary docs from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, WooCommerce and Shopify and asked the question a WooCommerce owner would ask: which of these can I actually use, and which am I waiting on?
The doors you can open yourself
Google: Merchant Center is the whole game
Google’s AI shopping answers draw on its Shopping Graph, which Google says is fed “either through information retailers share directly via Google Merchant Center or from what retailers and brands post across the web.” For a WooCommerce store, the direct route is the free Google for WooCommerce extension. WooCommerce’s documentation says: “Your products will sync automatically to make relevant information available for free listings, Google Ads, and other Google services.”
The useful detail is on Shopify’s side. Shopify’s own Help Center page for Google says that, even for Shopify stores, “Product discovery is powered by Google Merchant Center.” My inference: for Google discovery, a WooCommerce store with a clean Merchant Center feed is on the same footing as a Shopify store. There is no Shopify-only lane into AI Mode. What decides it is the feed itself, especially product identifiers. Being in Merchant Center makes you eligible. It does not guarantee you appear.
Copilot: Microsoft Merchant Center
Microsoft’s January announcement of Copilot Checkout has one sentence most coverage skipped: “Although MMC is not required to sell through Copilot Checkout, product feeds from MMC help inform organic Copilot results.” MMC is Microsoft Merchant Center. If your catalog is only in Google’s Merchant Center, Copilot is working from less of your data than it could.
ChatGPT: citations, not products
OpenAI’s commerce docs are blunt about the product side: “Onboarding product feeds in ChatGPT is currently available to approved partners. To apply for access, fill out this form.” So a WooCommerce store cannot put its catalog into ChatGPT’s shopping results on its own today. What it can do is let ChatGPT search read and cite its pages. That is OAI-SearchBot, which OpenAI says is “used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features.” It is a separate robots.txt setting from GPTBot, the training crawler. I wrote up what each OpenAI crawler does in September.
The doors that are still a form
- Google’s Buy button. Google’s Merchant Center page says “The checkout feature enabled by UCP is available for select merchants at this time.” It covers products eligible in the United States, Canada and Australia. You submit an interest form, implement the protocol, mark listings with the native_commerce attribute, and “You do need to create a Google Pay & Wallet Console account.” In return, “You will remain the seller of record.” WooCommerce says it is building this for you: on its WooCommerce AI page, “Capabilities like native checkout on Google’s AI surfaces are in active development and will roll out to beta users first.” That beta is “only available to stores in the U.S., not hosted on WordPress.com.”
- Copilot Checkout. Shopify stores were enrolled automatically. Everyone else goes through a payment partner: “For merchants who want to onboard using PayPal or Stripe: We’re now accepting applications.” Microsoft’s pitch is that “you stay the merchant of record.” Many WooCommerce stores already take payment through PayPal or Stripe, so this is the realistic route for them. When Microsoft announced it in January, it was “beginning to roll out in the U.S. on Copilot.com.”
- ChatGPT product feeds. The approved-partner form above.
- Perplexity. Its merchant program is also a form, and, as I found in September, you cannot pay for placement. Perplexity ranks on the product data it can see.
The shortcut: Shopify’s Agentic plan
Several guides now pitch the Agentic plan as “sell on ChatGPT without Shopify.” The plan is real. Shopify’s Help Center says it “is for merchants that don’t already use Shopify as their ecommerce platform,” and it “has no monthly subscription fee.” You pay payment fees when an order completes in an AI channel’s checkout. What the pitch leaves out is how it works.
You import your products into Shopify, by CSV, the GraphQL API, or a PIM connector app. When AI orders arrive, they “display in the Orders page” of your Shopify admin. To get them into WooCommerce or your warehouse, Shopify points you to webhooks such as orders/create. And “all refunds for orders placed through AI channels must be processed through your Shopify admin.” The setup guide also asks how quickly your inventory changes and whether you need to prevent overselling. Two systems now hold your stock count.
Two details correct the pitch. First, on the Agentic plan “direct checkout is deactivated by default.” Second, ChatGPT does not check out inside ChatGPT on this plan either: “ChatGPT sends customers to your existing online store checkout,” and “You can’t review your ChatGPT order history in Shopify.” The in-chat checkouts are Google, Copilot and Meta, and on this plan you switch them on yourself. Shopify’s plan page also still says “Get updates on availability,” so check that it is open to you before you plan around it.
When I wrote about the Agentic plan in August, I said it builds the road, not the car. The road also has a toll booth you did not see then: a second admin for orders and refunds.
What WooCommerce itself offers
Two things, and neither is a channel. WooCommerce AI is an assistant inside your dashboard, in private beta. The Claude Commerce Agent, published on WooCommerce’s developer blog in September, is a shopping assistant on your own site. In WooCommerce’s words, “The assistant never places an order or takes payment. Checkout is still on the store’s own page.” It needs a self-hosted Python service and an Anthropic API key, and WooCommerce says its agentic tools “are not maintained within official capacity.” It is a good experiment for a store with a developer. It does not get you into ChatGPT or Gemini.
What I would do this week
- Update Google for WooCommerce and fix every Merchant Center warning, starting with identifiers and price mismatches.
- Get the same catalog into Microsoft Merchant Center.
- Check robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot. Request a product page with that user agent and make sure the price is in the HTML.
- If you sell in the US, Canada or Australia, fill in Google’s UCP interest form and the ChatGPT feed form. If you take payment through PayPal or Stripe, apply for Copilot Checkout. Forms cost little.
- Take the Agentic plan only if you are willing to run AI orders and refunds in a second admin.
That order is my read, not any platform’s advice: free and open first, forms second, a second system last.
If you want to see how your product data reads to these channels before you apply, the free scan at pollen.elytron.in checks it.