Sacha Lefebvre Founder, Paid Ai Search · LinkedIn

100 SKUs is the gate

This week OpenAI shipped product feed automation for ChatGPT Ads (Modern Retail, May 12 2026).

You connect a feed (the same structured file you already send to Google Shopping) and the platform generates the ads from your product names, images, and attributes (OpenAI, “Testing ads in ChatGPT”). No more building campaigns manually.

Two numbers matter.

100. New advertisers submit a sample feed of around 100 SKUs before full catalog access. That’s the test. OpenAI looks at the sample, decides if you’re in (Modern Retail).

1,000,000. The ceiling per advertiser once you’re through.

Read what that means.

Whichever 100 SKUs you submit decide whether OpenAI lets the full catalog in. Half-finished product titles, missing images, broken GTINs, the gate doesn’t open. The Shopify operators paying $40 a click on Google with a clean feed are already in. The ones who treated the feed as a Google chore and never cleaned it up are not.

What to do this week, in under ten minutes.

Open Google Merchant Center. Sort your feed by performance. Pick the top 100 SKUs. Audit them on the basics: title, description, image quality, GTIN, MPN, all material attributes filled in. Not best. Complete.

That’s the submission you’d send the day this opens publicly. If you wouldn’t send it, fix it now.

Two reminders worth flagging.

OpenAI killed Instant Checkout weeks ago (CNBC, March 24 2026). The feed launch is the replacement strategy. They’re not retreating from shopping, they’re pivoting from a cut of your revenue to a cut of your ad spend. The line goes through ad-tech partners (StackAdapt, Criteo) instead of through Stripe (Modern Retail).

The auction is still CPC. Cost-per-action is “in development” (Modern Retail). For now: same lever as Google Shopping, different surface, different match logic. ChatGPT serves on conversational intent, not keywords (Search Engine Land, May 12 2026).

ChatGPT is the new channel. About 2× the conversion of anything you’re running now. You’re not on it yet. While it’s still cheap.

Sacha May 14, 2026 · Issue #8

If you want this signal four times a week, get the Wire.

Correction policy. If anything in this post is wrong, I’ll fix it inline and add a Correction line above this notice with the date, what was wrong, what’s correct, and the source. No silent edits.