Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET
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ZDNET's 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, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Also: I let ChatGPT Atlas do my Walmart shopping for me - here's how the AI browser agent did
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