🚨SCOOP🚨 Signs Emerging That ChatGPT and META/FaceBook are Cooking Up Big Shopping Feature Releases

ChatGPT is Going Local? What's a Shopping side bar. What's the mysterious AllProducts settings widget? META's bots are going Crazy on Shopping sites - let's dig in.

Three newsworthy scoops as we exit Summer and head into peak back-to-school and then a fast down-hill ride to Holiday 26. (15 weeks until Thanksgiving).

FLASH 1: ChatGPT Product Card Spike

Over the weekend our ACO monitoring system started going bonkers on ChatGPT data:

• Product Card visibility up 20% across many clients (% of prompts that elicit a product card)

• Card count per prompt that elicits a product card spiked from a range of 1-2 to 6-8

This has persisted through today.

Examples of New Experience

Here we’re looking for ‘face serum’:

Here I am a logged in user and ChatGPT knows I am in Raleigh, NC. Notice that the top of the map is dominated by a very detailed store finder. Notice the local map now is front and center, for this shopper experience. As I flip through different product cards, the beauty retailers that have the product turn on and off in the map, so it’s more of an interactive view than you would get from the google ‘show me in stock near me’ feature of Google Shopping.

There are also a ton of product cards under neath here - not in a carousel, each with a lot more exposition about the product.

When I click on a product card the offer card has changed:

The biggest change is the hero image has been enlarged compared to what we’ve seen previously and I can flip between images:

Finally, if I drill down on a store it pulls up a ‘store card’→

Here you get store-level reviews aggregated from Yelp! and what looks a lot like a “Google places” type treatment.

We’re seeing this consistently across free and logged in accounts - what are you seeing?

FLASH 3: Three New Shopping Related Feature Flags Detected

We have another set of agents that monitor the chatgpt front-end code for any interesting visible changes. As mentioned previously, ChatGPT has a framework:

1. Push new UI front-end with feature flags turned off - presumably for internal testing or tight A/B controlled audience testing (or both)

2. Over time, on the back-end they can turn these feature flags on and off when they want to roll out new features with a big bang - meaning you don’t have to wait for the new code to roll out via downloads for the app-based users (web can typically roll-out instantly).

Editorial note: Because we can’t turn these on and we’re dealing with unannounced features, this is pure speculation - educated speculation, but still 100% speculative, whereas the product-card visibility FLASH changes are live, observable and measurable.

New Feature Flag 1: shopping_sidebar_enabled

ChatGPT is using a company called statsig which is a platform for running A/B tests and gating off these types of new features. Speculating here, but we can see two statsig experiment IDs associated with this one. This pattern usually means - this feature is coming, let’s A/B it as we slowly roll it out and see which one has the highest KPIs (traffic/clicks/sales/cart adds/likes - could be anything).

New Feature Flag 2: ‘AllProducts’ Setting

The other setting is in the code in the settings/admin area. The sky’s the limit on this one. It could be a ‘god mode’ feature where super ChatGPT admins can see all the products in the system, it could be a user setting where you can see a wishlist type functionality, it could be a ‘product history’ view. This one’s harder to predict.

New Feature Flag 3: 'navigate_checkout’ and ‘prepare_checkout’

These are part of the checkout sequence. The current checkout situation at ChatGPT is basically what we call cart injection (where available down-stream). Most likely this does not indicate that they are revisiting a full-blown checkout, but is some process improvements to the injection. That being said, we haven’t seen this much action since March 26 when checkout was abandoned.

META’s Crawler goes Crazy - What are they building?

Popular ‘build in the open’ account on X, levelsio on August 6 posted that he was seeing across his various sites. He then followed up with this post:

Levelsio claims that META told him they are building their own search index. EU GEO company Peec chimed in:

Cloudflare Radar tracks bot traffic across their massive network and they conveniently break it down by 'category of target’ and they have “Shopping & General Merchandise” in the 7 day window, it’s clear that META is crawling the retail category especially heavily.

Zooming out and looking at 4 weeks, you can see another interesting trend:

Look at that Claudebot activity. Why do you think Claude AND META are both showing a dramatic increase in traffic right now?

I have some guesses on what’s going on, I suspect in the next 2-3 months there’s going to be some pretty exciting announcements along the lines of my original 2026 predictions.

On the META side, digiday reports that prior to 1H 2026, the categories were balanced, but now S+GM is significantly the majority of the crawls, showing this was not ‘business as usual’.

Summary

To Summarize it’s mid August and:

• ChatGPT is adding local inventory to their product and offer cards and showing way more cards than previously

• They are in test with a shopping_sidebar feature on the consumer side.

• There’s a merchant or internal feature called “AllProducts”

• Two new checkout variables or tests were introduced

• META and Anthropic are crawling shopping sites at a frenetic pace

Stay tuned, we’re tracking this closely…