GUIDE

What is the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)

OpenAI and Stripe open-sourced ACP on Sep 29, 2025 under the Apache 2.0 license, with 9 required product feed fields.

Updated October 30, 20265 min read

Apache 2Open-source license for OpenAI and Stripe's ACP beta specification
5Published ACP spec versions between Sep 2025 and Apr 2026 on GitHub
9Required product feed fields in OpenAI's commerce specification

In short

The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is an open-source beta standard co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe under the Apache 2.0 license, released September 29, 2025.
OpenAI launched Instant Checkout on September 29, 2025, then moved merchants back to their own checkout on March 24, 2026 while extending ACP to product discovery.
Non-Shopify merchants can deliver feeds through Salesforce and Stripe, or apply to send an SFTP feed with 9 required fields, with no fees for site or app purchases.
Retailers that block automated access may be skipped in ChatGPT shopping research.

What is the Agentic Commerce Protocol and what changed in March 2026

The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is an open-source technical standard in beta, co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe under the Apache 2.0 license and first released on September 29, 2025, according to the ACP GitHub repository. OpenAI's commerce documentation covers the Agentic Checkout spec, the Delegated Payment spec, and product feeds. Between September 2025 and April 2026, the maintainers published five dated specification releases on GitHub:

Spec version	Release date	Features added in the ACP GitHub repository
2025-09-29	Sep 29, 2025	Initial open-source release (Apache 2.0, beta)
2025-12-12	Dec 12, 2025	Fulfillment
2026-01-16	Jan 16, 2026	Capability negotiation
2026-01-30	Jan 30, 2026	Extensions, discounts, payment handlers
2026-04-17	Apr 17, 2026	Cart, feed, orders, authentication, MCP

On September 29, 2025, OpenAI also launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, built with Stripe and starting with U.S. Etsy sellers. On March 24, 2026, OpenAI announced that the first version of Instant Checkout "did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide" and moved merchants to their own checkout while focusing on product discovery. On March 24, 2026, OpenAI also extended ACP to product discovery, naming retailers Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe's, Best Buy, The Home Depot, and Wayfair.

Step 1: Connect your product catalog through Shopify, a partner, or a direct feed

Your first step is giving ChatGPT structured product metadata. According to OpenAI's October 2026 merchant documentation, shopping is live for U.S. ChatGPT users with "no fees for purchases made on your site or app". Unlike ChatGPT ads, OpenAI states in its October 2026 help documentation that "Product results are selected independently by ChatGPT and are not ads, nor influenced by any OpenAI partnerships. Ads are separate from product results."

You have three ways to submit your catalog:

Use Shopify: OpenAI's October 2026 merchant page states that Shopify merchants are included through Shopify Catalog without extra work.
Use an integration partner: In its March 24, 2026 announcement, OpenAI stated that feeds can be delivered through Salesforce and Stripe.
Apply to send a direct SFTP feed: Other merchants can apply at chatgpt.com/merchants to share a direct feed.

According to OpenAI's product feed specification, direct feeds are pushed over SFTP as full snapshots, with at least daily uploads recommended and Parquet as the preferred format. Every record requires 9 fields:

item_id
title
description
url
brand
seller_name
image_url
availability
price

Step 2: Keep your public product pages open to OpenAI's crawlers

Submitting a feed is only half the job, because ChatGPT also reads public retail pages and third-party web content when recommending products. OpenAI launched shopping research on November 24, 2025, stating in its help documentation that results are organic and based on public retail sites, and that retailers blocking automated access may be skipped. OpenAI's October 2026 shopping help article adds that ChatGPT ranks merchants on availability, price, quality, and whether they are the maker or primary seller, using structured metadata from first-party and third-party providers alongside other third-party content.

To check crawler access, verify how your server responds to OpenAI's bots:

Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and firewall rules so OpenAI's search crawler can index product and category pages.
Allow ChatGPT-User so ChatGPT can fetch live pages when a user asks a question.
Put core product facts (price, availability, brand, description) in raw HTML without requiring JavaScript, and match them in JSON-LD structured data.

Step 3: Check how ChatGPT reads and cites your product pages

You can verify technical crawler access and whether ChatGPT cites your store by testing URLs and tracking buyer questions. Start with the free GEO audit, which requires no account and allows 5 audits a day. It fetches your page using the OAI-SearchBot user agent, rebuilds the title and the snippet of about 200 characters that ChatGPT's search keeps, looks the page up in ChatGPT, and returns a score out of 100 with a letter grade across bot protection, HTML text without JavaScript, JSON-LD, and robots.txt rules.

To monitor ongoing discovery, add your website and customer questions to FoundByChat, which is free to start with Google or an email link and no credit card. FoundByChat asks ChatGPT those questions with web search on every 2 hours as a user in the United States (English) or the Netherlands (Dutch). Each check records whether ChatGPT's search found your page ("Found"), cited it ("Cited"), and its usual position among search results, while listing the title and short snippet kept in ChatGPT's index.

Common mistakes merchants make with ACP and ChatGPT shopping

Most ACP mistakes come from outdated assumptions about in-chat checkout or confusion about OpenAI's crawlers. Avoid these four pitfalls when setting up your store for AI SEO:

Building for the September 2025 Instant Checkout flow: On March 24, 2026, OpenAI moved merchants to their own checkout while focusing on product discovery.
Sending partial feed deltas instead of full snapshots: OpenAI's file upload specification requires full catalog snapshots over SFTP, recommended at least daily, with all 9 required fields populated.
Blocking OAI-SearchBot when trying to block AI training: Blocking GPTBot stops OpenAI's training crawler, but blocking OAI-SearchBot blocks OpenAI's search crawler, and OpenAI warns that retailers blocking automated access may be skipped in shopping research.
Assuming ChatGPT displays your exact feed copy verbatim: According to OpenAI's October 2026 shopping help article, product titles, descriptions, labels like "Budget-friendly", and review summaries are generated by ChatGPT and not verified by OpenAI.

FOUNDBYCHAT

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We ask ChatGPT your questions every 2 hours and mail you what its index picked up or rewrote. Free to start: sign in with Google or an email link.

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Questions

Who created the Agentic Commerce Protocol and what license does it use?

The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) was co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe and open-sourced on September 29, 2025. According to its GitHub repository, the specification uses the Apache 2.0 license and is in beta.

Did OpenAI shut down Instant Checkout in ChatGPT?

OpenAI launched Instant Checkout on September 29, 2025, built with Stripe and starting with U.S. Etsy sellers. On March 24, 2026, OpenAI stated that the first version "did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide" and moved merchants back to their own checkout while focusing on product discovery.

Does OpenAI charge fees for purchases made on a merchant's site or app?

No, OpenAI's October 2026 merchant page states there are "no fees for purchases made on your site or app". OpenAI's October 2026 help documentation also notes that product results are selected independently by ChatGPT and are not ads.

Do Shopify merchants need to build an ACP feed manually?

No, OpenAI's October 2026 merchant page states that Shopify merchants are included through Shopify Catalog without extra work. Feeds can also be delivered through Salesforce and Stripe. Other merchants can apply at chatgpt.com/merchants to share a product feed; at least daily full snapshots over SFTP are recommended.

How can I check if ChatGPT's search crawler is indexing my product pages?

Run the free GEO audit at foundbychat.com/geo-audit to fetch your page with the OAI-SearchBot user agent and see the about-200-character snippet ChatGPT's search keeps. You can also use FoundByChat to check buyer questions every 2 hours and get email alerts when a page is "New in the index" or its "Snippet changed".