The honest answer for products and for services, why it depends on where you are, and the audit that gets your store ready for ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot this week.
Somewhere in the last year, a lot of business owners got told that AI assistants were about to become shopping malls, and that if they weren't listed, they'd be invisible. Some of that is true. Quite a lot of it isn't. And the parts that are true are not the parts most people are working on.
This article is the audit. By the end you'll know whether an AI assistant can sell your product at all, what's blocking you if it can't, and exactly what to fix. Most of the work takes a few hours. One part of it is probably costing you money right now without you knowing.
What actually happened, and what most articles get wrong
In September 2025, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. You could see a product in a conversation, press a button, and buy it without leaving the chat. Etsy sellers went first, Shopify merchants followed, and the whole industry decided this was the future.