OpenAI introduced product recommendations into ChatGPT on Monday, creating a potential opportunity for advertising—and a threat to affiliate marketing sites.

The new update would allow ChatGPT to “surface relevant products” when users imply shopping intent, per a blog post.

The advertising opportunity

While OpenAI doesn’t currently have ads, it is exploring them as a revenue source, and product recommendations are a step towards that model.

“Although it's not trying to make money from the feature at the moment, OpenAI is clearly setting up a structure that's ideal for affiliate fees, i.e., commissions they can earn from traffic they send to a retailer that leads to a sale,” said our analyst Yoram Wurmser.

Affiliate marketing offers a strong opportunity for OpenAI. It will be an $11.99 billion dollar industry in the US this year and grow by 11.9% YoY, per our August 2024 forecast.

Challenge to affiliate

But much of OpenAI's product information likely comes from the very media companies its affiliate model would undercut—sites like the New York Times’ Wirecutter that offer curated recommendations ChatGPT can scrape, personalize, and regurgitate. Affiliate marketing on OpenAI would thus require updated agreements with these publishers.

“OpenAI has already reached content sharing agreements with some publishers, but it will need to increase those flat fees or create some sort of revenue sharing mechanism to avoid charges of unfair use,” Wurmser said.

AI search products like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews have already taken a bite out of publisher’s revenues by serving content without requiring users click through to sites, resulting in “zero-click” search—searches that result in no site visit. Nearly 60% of Google searches ended without a click in 2024, per July 2024 data from SparkToro founder Rand Fishkin and Datos. This figure is likely even higher on ChatGPT, where searches don’t always result in links.

Piling onto existing pains

Google still accounts for 87.3% of US search market share, according to February 2025 data from StatCounter, so traditional affiliate sites will continue to benefit from Google’s traffic. But Google’s own SEO updates and generative AI overviews also pose a threat to affiliate marketing.

Retail affiliate marketing revenues took a hit of over 15% YoY in Q2 2024, when Google’s updates went into effect.

Affiliate marketing in ChatGPT could pose an existential threat to affiliate sites that are already hurting. But it could also provide opportunities for publishers to reach new data-sharing agreements with OpenAI.

For brands, ChatGPT’s product recommendations could soon provide an affiliate opportunity beyond sites with which they may already be working. And in the meantime, the update is an impetus for brands to make sure their products are surfacing in ChatGPT’s results.

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