Coffee above 194°F is burned

Issue #1 · April 13, 2026

An Aussie customer on one of my Vespa tours in Madrid taught me real coffee is made below 194°F. Anything hotter burns it. I have been picky ever since.

Last week my machine broke. I pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus. Plus has no ads. I typed:

“I am looking to buy an automatic coffee machine, max $800, that actually makes coffee below boiling temperature to avoid burning the beans. What do you recommend?”

It gave me four machines: Breville Barista Express Impress, De’Longhi Magnifica Start, Philips 5500 LatteGo, Breville Bambino Plus.

Then I clicked one.

A side panel opened inside the chat. Product image. Rating. Price. Three retailer buttons: Best Buy, Williams-Sonoma, Crate & Barrel. “In stock online. Free delivery April 20 to 23.” A Visit button next to each.

Then I clicked “Explore more.”

The chat became a store. A grid of 12 coffee machines. Nespresso. Gaggia. Ninja. MOOSOO. VEVOR. Brands I didn’t ask for, from retailers I never searched, with live inventory and delivery windows. No search bar. No filters. Just what ChatGPT decided I should see.

I am on the ad-free tier. There were no ads. This is something else.

OpenAI is building a commerce layer into ChatGPT’s shopping experience. Shopify merchants are already integrated through Shopify Catalog, which means ChatGPT can pull from Shopify product data without merchants doing extra setup. That does not mean every store is visible, recommended, or optimized. It means the infrastructure is already live.

Not by invitation. By default. Shopify emailed merchants that the channel would launch automatically for their store. To not appear, you have to actively opt out in your Shopify admin. Most merchants do not know either setting exists.

If you sell on Shopify, your products are already in the ChatGPT grid. You were not asked. You were not notified. You are in until you opt out.

The half-built version is already recommending products to hundreds of millions of weekly users, on the tier that has no ads, on the tier that was supposed to be protected from commerce. Nobody at OpenAI is going to email you when your category gets indexed. Nobody at Shopify is going to tell you which of your SKUs show up and which do not.

Here is what I want you to do before Tuesday. Open ChatGPT. Type:

“I’m looking to buy [your product type] for [use case]. Budget around $[X]. What do you recommend?”

Screenshot the answer. Click a product. Screenshot the side panel. Click Explore more. Screenshot that too.

If you sell on Shopify, also open your Shopify admin and check your Agentic Storefronts setting while you are at it.

Save everything. In six months you will want to know where you started.

Every source from this issue: /blog/issue-1-sources