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Key takeaways

• Amazon is blocking ChatGPT's AI shopping tools.
• Links to Amazon pages might not appear in a ChatGPT search.
• Amazon doesn't want AI bots cutting into its revenue.

ChatGPT's new shopping research agent is designed to find and compare products from your favorite online retail stores, all on your behalf. Sounds like a helpful tool for holiday shopping. But at least one retailer is saying "Bah, humbug" to the whole concept.

In a change discovered in November by e-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas on LinkedIn, Amazon has set up new rules to restrict OpenAI's web crawlers from crawling the retail site. Specifically, the two latest rules now in effect stop ChatGPT from browsing Amazon's site when you ask a question or when you run a web search, Kaziukėnas said.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, 's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

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Looking at Amazon's robots.txt file , which provides instructions to web crawlers, the two new rules are clearly visible. One is for "User-agent: ChatGPT-User" and the other for "User-agent: OAI-SearchBot." Both are marked Disallow, meaning that these particular web crawlers are restricted from accessing the Amazon store site.

These latest rules follow a prior one in which Amazon restricted ChatGPT from using its site to train its AI models, according to Kaziukėnas. Also found in the robots.txt file, this one for "User-agent: GPTBot" is likewise set to Disallow. Collectively, these rules affect a couple of ChatGPT bots.

Rolled out in late November, the ChatGPT shopping research tool will act as your own personal shopper. Tell the AI that you're looking for a particular product with certain features in a specific price range, and it will scour the web to find retailers where you can buy the item.

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Another tool called Instant Research, launched in September, lets you not only find but actually purchase a product from a third-party retailer without leaving ChatGPT. ChatGPT's personal shopping bots started as an experiment earlier this year to see if the AI could carry out a shopping expedition on your behalf.

My shopping tests

Now it seems that none of those skills will work with Amazon if you're holiday shopping through OpenAI's AI. To test this, I ran a couple of shopping requests at ChatGPT. However, the results were inconsistent.

In one request, I told it to find the best Magsafe chargers for iPhones at Amazon. In response, I received a list of matching products but with no links to their product pages on Amazon. After I specifically asked ChatGPT to include links to the Amazon pages, the AI served up what it said were direct links to Amazon or online retailers. But again, none of them pointed to Amazon.

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In another request, I asked ChatGPT to find a specific product that I had previously ordered on Amazon. The response? Instead of giving me the product page on Amazon, it told me that it was going to list alternative sellers. It then provided me with links to the item at Walmart, eBay, and a retailer called Soaplicity.

However, when I pressed it to find the product on Amazon, it did finally link to the Amazon page. In his LinkedIn post, Kaziukėnas said that ChatGPT still retains Amazon data from archived web crawls, so that could be why the link popped up in this instance. Otherwise, the AI seems keen on avoiding direct access to Amazon.

Why is Amazon restricting AI bots?

ChatGPT is hardly the only AI to ruffle Amazon's feathers. In early November, the retailer sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity AI, demanding that it block its agentic Comet browser from buying items on behalf of users at Amazon's online store. The letter sheds some light on why Amazon is so against agentic AI browsing its site.

The letter claims that Perplexity has taken steps to conceal its agentic activities in the Amazon Store and that transparency is critical because it helps a service provider limit conduct that degrades the shopping experience and creates security risks for customers. It also asserts that an AI like Comet may not choose the best price, delivery method, or recommendations that Amazon itself would provide.

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But Amazon has other reasons for keeping the door closed to AI bots. The company rakes in around $56 billion a year from advertising, as reported by Modern Retail. That revenue depends on people browsing the site's advertisements. At ChatGPT or Perplexity, those ads can be bypassed.

Amazon certainly doesn't have anything against AI. But here, the company would rather customers use its own tools rather than those of a third party. In particular, Amazon relies on its Rufus AI bot to help people find the right products. And Rufus is providing a big boost to sales.

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In the US, the number of Amazon customers who used Rufus and bought an item on Black Friday jumped by 100% compared with the trailing 30 days. In contrast, the number of people who bought something but didn't use Rufus rose by only 20%, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower as spotted by TechCrunch.

Though third-party shopping agents may be persona non grata at Amazon for the time being, the company isn't closing the door entirely, according to Modern Retail. In a recent earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that the company is "having conversations" with third-party shopping agents and expects to "find ways to partner" over time.

I reached out to both Amazon and OpenAI for comment and will update the story if either company responds.

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