PayPal is wiring its Honey shopping assistant into big AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, in another step toward meeting consumers where product searches are increasingly starting. After adding the Honey browser extension to Chrome, live prices, merchant options and eligible deals will appear alongside AI-generated recommendations in a secondary window on your computer when shopping online from a product category, creating a comparison layer that travels with shoppers as they browse and ultimately check out.
Why Honey Is Plugging Into ChatGPT for Shopping
Search behavior is moving from web pages to conversational cues. Consumers no longer open multiple tabs: instead of doing research on the best carry-on, a midrange espresso machine or deal on noise-canceling headphones, they now ask an AI. E-commerce already makes up about a sixth of all retail sales, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and AI-driven discovery promises to channel a larger share of those transactions through intelligent assistants. Honey’s move is both an offensive and a defensive play: defend its coupon-and-cashback beachhead while plugging itself into AI shopping flows.
How the Integration Works Across Chatbots and Stores
When a user asks a chatbot for recommendations of products, the Honey extension can show the products that the AI suggests with their real-time price, availability and store options. It also calls out where a common store is absent from the AI’s inventory, and adds those options so that shoppers can compare more broadly. If discounts or merchant offers exist as part of the conversation, Honey brings them up without having to make users leave the thread.
Take a prompt like “best trail-running shoes under $150.” The chatbot serves up a number of models; Honey adds up-to-the-moment prices across multiple retailers, lets you know if sizes are in stock and automatically applies eligible coupon codes at checkout. The hope is that this advertising injects some trust back into the process of buying something you stumble across on Pinterest and want to buy for your mantel.
(NOTE: The extension also serves as a sanity check. Large language models can recommend products that aren’t in stock or overlook the competition’s pricing. In grounding suggestions in live merchant data, Honey is positioning itself as a guardrail against hallucinations or incomplete answers.)
Agentic Commerce Strategy Comes Into Focus
The integration is one step of PayPal’s “agentic commerce” strategy in general—tools that enable AI agents to find products, compare offers, and make purchases on behalf of a shopper. That includes a joint arrangement with Google for agent-led buying journeys, a dedicated commerce agent offering, a remote server infrastructure that connects agents to merchant information and an Agent Toolkit meant to help brands plug in offers and product catalogs.
PayPal is also advertising surrounding partnerships, including the ability for consumers to purchase premium AI search from Perplexity and its new Comet browser. The throughline: simplify the process for AI assistants to access trusted pricing, inventory and incentives straight from sellers — then turn that into greater conversion and measurable incremental sales.
Rivals Are Erecting Their Own Shopping Rails
AI platforms are not only distribution partners — they’re potential competitors. OpenAI introduces an autonomous shopping experience and Instant Checkout method — in conjunction with Etsy, but eyeing up Shopify sellers next. If chat platforms develop over time into end-to-end shopping experiences, then third-party deal layers like Honey have to show that they actually add something new and distinctive in price visibility, breadth of product choice and cash savings.
Meanwhile, other marketplaces like Amazon and search giants keep refining their own recommendation engines. Which means Honey has to deliver measurable lift for merchants (as in, think: basket size increases, offer targeting improvements and overall better attribution) without bringing on more friction for shoppers.
Trust, Attribution and the Creator Backdrop
Honey’s debut also comes at a time of increased scrutiny over affiliate attribution. Creators have accused the company of crediting sales stemming from influencer content to other channels and lawsuits followed. PayPal, for its part, has denied wrongdoing, but the episode highlights a larger question in AI-era digital commerce: who gets credit when a buyer’s journey winds through a creator video, an AI chat and then out to a coupon extension.
Look for closer alignment with advertising and disclosure guidelines proposed by the Federal Trade Commission, and improved reporting from brands to creators. In practical terms, Honey will live or die by the formal rules that will govern rankings of recommendations, how offers are applied and how commissions are measured across overlapping touchpoints.
What Shoppers and Merchants Need to Watch
The upside for the consumer is speedier comparisons and savings on autopilot within whatever chat window you have already opened. Check return policies and warranty coverage across merchants, and treat AI recommendations as a starting point — Honey’s cross-store view is good for finding outliers and short-term deals.
For merchants, the immediate work is data readiness: clean product feeds, accurate pricing and clear offer logic so that agents can find and rank items dependably. More importantly, the real prize is being able to engage on agentive journeys with strong attribution and measure true incrementality starting from AI-driven discovery all the way through checkout.
The upshot: even as shopping shifts more from search bars to chat boxes, PayPal’s Honey wants to be the connective tissue — checking prices, expanding selection and applying savings in real time. Whether it becomes a must-have will depend on how well it threads the needle between convenience, transparency and trust in an increasingly complex AI commerce stack.
