Amazon has quietly closed its digital doors on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, stopping the AI powerhouse from looking through its website and accessing the millions of products that it sells.
The change means ChatGPT’s new Shopping Research feature, which launched on Monday, can no longer tap live Amazon listings, prices or reviews when generating gift ideas and product recommendations. Even more, it will no longer be able to show Amazon deals at all.
That timing couldn't be worse for OpenAI, with its users likely now looking for the best Black Friday deals. During this period, Amazon Black Friday will be one of the biggest sales of the year, and one that OpenAI wouldn't want to miss.
What is ChatGPT shopping research?
ChatGPT shopping research is OpenAI’s new tool that turns the chatbot into a smarter personal shopper.
You describe what you need, like your budget, preferences and use case, and it pulls in product information, specs, reviews and availability from multiple online sources. It can then summarize that into tailored recommendations and shows products and deals that best fit your needs.
It’s designed to reduce the many steps and countless tabs needed to go from research to purchase. It is available to both free and paid ChatGPT users in all regions, with higher limits during the holidays to support gift and big-purchase research.
Introducing shopping research, a new experience in ChatGPT that does the research to help you find the right products.It’s everything you like about deep research but with an interactive interface to help you make smarter purchasing decisions. pic.twitter.com/jksGVpCXGmNovember 24, 2025
Why has Amazon blocked it?
This change was first spotted by Juozas Kaziukenas on LinkedIn, highlighting the code that stops OpenAI from accessing Amazon.
Amazon’s main goal here, as highlighted by Modern Retail, is to keep control over its e‑commerce data, everything from product pages and prices to reviews and availability, and how that data is used by third‑party AI tools.
By updating its robots.txt file to disallow multiple OpenAI crawlers, including the “ChatGPT‑User” agent for live browsing and the “OAI‑SearchBot” used for search, Amazon is effectively telling ChatGPT it can’t index or tap that catalog in real time.
In simpler terms, Amazon has blocked OpenAI from accessing its website via any type of ChatGPT-based tool.
According to Modern Retail, the tech giant is worried that external “AI agents” could scrape its site, build shopping models on top of its data, and then steer users to buy elsewhere.
President and CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, told Modern Retail they’re already “having conversations” with third‑party shopping agents, and expect they will “find ways to partner.”
Not only that, but Amazon has its own AI service, Alexa+. The company will likely want to prioritise those who use this service over its competitors.
What this means for you
OpenAI promotes Shopping Research as “a new experience in ChatGPT that does the research to help you find the right products." It asks smart, clarifying questions, researches deeply across the internet, reviews quality sources, and turns that into “a personalized buyer’s guide in minutes.”
Behind the scenes, however, OpenAI’s crawler docs say its bots “respect robots.txt rules,” which means Shopping Research can only use data from sites that haven’t told those bots to stay out.
Modern Retail’s tests show what that looks like with Amazon. For instance, when you ask specifically for Amazon picks, ChatGPT instead recommends products from other retailers and nudges you to check availability on Amazon yourself.
It can also simply tell users that it can't access Amazon, and they will need to look for themselves.
For shoppers going forward, ChatGPT’s new Shopping Research can still compare a lot of products and build tailored buyer’s guides, but Amazon now sits outside that experience.
Anyone interested in Amazon prices or Prime perks will need to double‑check those deals manually in a separate tab.
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