The news: Perplexity is relaunching its agentic shopping product and making it available to all users next week, just ahead of Black Friday, per CNBC.

• The revamped tool, which builds on the “Buy With Pro” shopping tool rolled out for Pro subscribers almost exactly a year ago, is better at spotting shopping intent and will deliver more personalized results by using memory from a user’s past searches, the company said.
• Perplexity partnered with PayPal for the rollout. Users will eventually be able to purchase items directly from more than 5,000 merchants through Perplexity’s search engine. PayPal merchants will serve as the merchants of record, managing purchases, customer service, and returns directly—a shift from “Buy With Pro,” where Perplexity acted as the intermediary. PayPal’s buyer-protection policies, which can reimburse users when orders go wrong, will also apply to transactions on Perplexity.

Zooming out: Making its agentic shopping tool widely available puts Perplexity in more direct competition with OpenAI, which launched Instant Checkout in late September. OpenAI’s feature, which lets users purchase products directly through ChatGPT, helped fuel an ecommerce arms race as industry heavyweights work to make online shopping more seamless.

Just in the past few weeks:

• Amazon—which is suing Perplexity to stop its Comet agentic AI browser from shopping on users’ behalf—added agentic shopping features to its Rufus chatbot. Customers can ask Rufus to monitor products and buy when an item hits a target price or discount. Shoppers can authorize Rufus via an “Auto Buy” button and have 24 hours to cancel before the item ships.
• Google introduced agentic checkout ahead of the holiday season and rolled out a slate of new AI-powered shopping and booking-related features, including conversational shopping in Google’s AI mode and an agentic tool that can call nearby stores to check availability.

Our take: Tech giants are clearly all-in on GenAI-powered shopping tools this holiday season. There’s good reason for the enthusiasm—shopping has gained a larger share of mobile queries within ChatGPT than any other topic, per Sensor Tower data cited by Bain & Company. But it’s still a sliver of a relatively small, but growing, user base, so sales are likely to remain modest this year, giving retailers and brands a low-risk chance to test and learn. That groundwork will help them understand the channel now so they’re better positioned to win when demand eventually picks up.

Go further: Read our report What ChatGPT Instant Checkout Means for Brands and Retailers.