- with readers working within the Utilities industries
The ChatGPT Instant Checkout ushers in a new era of conversational commerce. Brands need to adapt their brand protection and anti-counterfeiting strategies to secure their sales in the AI era, says Marc-Emmanuel Mellet.
Launched on 23 July 2025, Instant Checkout is a ChatGPT feature that allows you to buy a recommended product with a single click, with the agentic (AI) commerce protocol integrated directly into the conversation via Stripe. Although limited to US users shopping on Etsy for now, support for Shopify and other merchants is already planned. This means that ChatGPT Instant Checkout could soon become industry-wide, since Shopify is a popular, all-in-one cloud platform used for creating, managing and growing online stores.
OpenAI claims that the system does not bias product rankings, so no offer is favoured simply because it is integrated. Instead, positioning is still based on classic criteria such as price, quality, availability and primary seller status. Despite this promise of neutrality, the new feature is likely to have critical implications for trademark owners.
AI: Instant visibility but also counterfeit risks
Instant Checkout transforms every exchange with ChatGPT into a true business showcase. Instead of a simple text response, the user sees a 'Buy Now' button with the price, availability and a short description. This massive exposure enables brand owners to potentially reach hundreds of millions of users without resorting to paid advertising campaigns.
However, the protocol aggregates the product feeds of all sellers present on platforms related to ChatGPT, allowing malicious sellers to publish listings containing the logos, photos and names of well-known brands to mislead consumers. Unlike marketplaces like Amazon, ChatGPT does not always show a "Verified Seller" label, so the consumer does not know whether they are buying from an authorised reseller or an unauthorised third party. Once AI suggests a counterfeit product, the same recommendation can be reproduced repeatedly every time the same query is asked, amplifying the negative impact. Thus, the visibility offered by Instant Checkout must be accompanied by a proactive protection strategy; otherwise, the gain in awareness could quickly turn into loss of reputation, consumer complaints and infringement actions.
How to secure brands in this new AI era
For AI to prioritise legitimate offers, brands need to embrace Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), the conversational equivalent of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). The latter allows you to optimise a website to improve its visibility and ranking in organic search engine results.
The first step is to enrich catalogues with authenticity metadata: The "brand_verified: true" field indicates that the seller owns the rights to use the trademark, "origin_country" specifies the country of origin of the product, and "copyright_holder" identifies the copyright owner.
Product descriptions should be limited to 150-200 characters, and contain the most relevant keywords, including brand name, range and colour. The use of structured attributes such as "size", "material" or "colour" allows for precise filtering and display of the most suitable variants. Verified ratings, along with an average score and the number of reviews from a trusted source, increase relevance and decrease the likelihood that AI will select a questionable offer.
In addition, as a protection, it is recommended that your product photos include a discreet watermark containing the brand name and a unique identifier, as well as EXIF* (Exchangeable Image File Format) metadata ("artist", "copyright") that the protocol can use to display an "Official Product" label. Finally, each variant (size, colour) must have a separate SKU** (Stock Keeping Unit), its own price and an actual stock to prevent the AI from offering a non-existent variant, causing confusion and complaints.
By applying these best practices, the catalogue becomes readable for the language model, which pushes AI to favour complete and authenticated records and reduces the room for counterfeiters who, without metadata, will be relegated to the background or rejected by the relevance system.
* EXIF metadata is information embedded directly into the image file – such as the date and time it was taken, camera model, exposure settings, geolocation, etc – which describe the capture conditions and the technical characteristics of the photo.
** SKU is a unique alphanumeric code assigned to each product number or variant (size, colour, etc.) to facilitate inventory management, sales tracking, and accurate identification of items in commerce systems.
Legal and technical defence mechanisms
For protection, the first step is to set up surveillance. A monitoring tool queries the OpenAI API with typical queries ("buy a Glossier dress", "Skims handbag") and extracts the products identified in this way to be then analysed by the companies and/or their advisers.
In the event of a discovery of counterfeiting, it is crucial to collect evidence: Keeping access logs, screenshots of AI responses, and associated metadata is the essential digital evidence in the event of litigation.
It is then necessary to take action directly with the sales platforms (Etsy, Shopify, etc) to obtain the removal of ads for the sale of counterfeit products, but also to obtain the "delisting" of these ads from ChatGPT. The traditional mechanisms can be used by trademark owners.
Finally, consumer confidence must be preserved using labels of authenticity. With the "brand_verified: true" metadata, the protocol can automatically display a visual badge in the chat, reassuring the user and discouraging unauthorised resellers. The return policy must be integrated into the checkout flow, with an explicit link to the brand's terms and an automated refund mechanism, to satisfy legal requirements, including the 14-day right of withdrawal in the EU. An authorised reseller program, accessible via a public API, allows merchants to verify that they are authorised before submitting their catalogues.
By combining these technical and legal levers, trademark owners can harness the commercial potential of ChatGPT Instant Checkout while effectively protecting their IP rights and limiting the spread of counterfeit products. Given that the future of digital commerce is now to be played out in conversation, the brands that succeed in securing this new front will be those that make the most of this development.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
