Updated 2026-10-13. Each item carries its own source and date; items marked observed are walkthroughs someone ran on the surface, not company disclosures.
2026-10-05
Razorpay sells ChatGPT Ads to Indian brands; OpenAI adds a visual ad format
On 5 October Razorpay partnered with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT Ads to Indian brands through Razorpay Engage, which prepares product catalogues, launches and manages campaigns and tracks performance. The same week OpenAI introduced a visual ad format showing a product in use, tested first in image-generation queries; Fastrack, Traya, Tata Neu, Rivaah by Tanishq, Shaadi.com, Axis Max Life and Tanishq were named as early advertisers.
Source: exchange4media, 9 Oct 2026; Forbes India, 8 Oct 2026
2026-09-01
ChatGPT ads at a $1 billion annualised run rate in under 200 days
OpenAI reported the run rate on 31 August, six days after switching ads on in India for Free and Go users. A run rate is a pace, not booked revenue. Our co-founder was quoted in the same piece: the yardstick is incremental ROAS, not CPM.
Source: exchange4media, 1 Sep 2026
2026-08-19 · observed
ChatGPT's third checkout design in a year completed a real order
After its own checkout with the Agentic Commerce Protocol in 2025 and a spring pause in favour of apps, the plug-in "integrated checkout" completed a BestBuy order start to finish in Retailgentic's test: offer card, Open, shipping, payment. One item, no loyalty programme.
Source: Retailgentic, FLASH with video walkthrough, 19 Aug 2026
2026-08-11
Product cards spiked and local store cards appeared
Retailgentic's monitoring saw product-card visibility up 20% across its clients and card counts per prompt move from a range of 1-2 to 6-8, with a store finder and store cards in logged-in sessions. Client code carried feature flags named shopping_sidebar_enabled, navigate_checkout and prepare_checkout, which the authors label as speculation until switched on.
Source: Retailgentic, SCOOP, 11 Aug 2026
2026-08-25
For Shopify stores, ChatGPT still hands off to your checkout
Shopify's documentation: ChatGPT "currently operates as a discovery and referral channel: customers complete their purchase through the merchant's Shopify checkout in an in-app browser or a new tab". The recommendation happens in the chat; the order still happens on your rails.
Source: Retailgentic, Shopify and Agentic Commerce Part 2, 25 Aug 2026
2026-09-01
OpenAI's ad platform passed $1B about 200 days after launch
Per Retailgentic's August roundup, OpenAI said its ads business crossed $1B roughly 200 days after launching; Amazon took about five years to reach the same mark. Paid placement inside the same answers that recommend products is now a budget line, not a rumour.
Source: Retailgentic, August Agentic News, 1 Sep 2026
