A five-step form in the perplexity.ai footer, free and commission-free, for stores that ship to the US. What it asks, what to prepare, and what to expect afterwards.
Perplexity answers shopping questions with product cards and links, and it runs a merchant program that lets stores supply their catalog directly rather than hoping the crawler finds the right page. The program is free, takes no commission, and the application is a five-step form linked from the footer of perplexity.ai. It is also the least transparent of the self-serve surfaces: no published review time, no feed upload in the form. Here is what it is, exactly what the form asks, what to have ready, and where it belongs in a non-Shopify store’s day of setup.
Perplexity’s merchant program is an application route for stores that sell and ship to the United States. Accepted merchants can provide product data to Perplexity so that shopping answers draw on the merchant’s own catalog — titles, prices, availability, images — instead of whatever the crawler last saw. Purchases happen on the merchant’s own site; Perplexity is a discovery surface here, not a checkout, and the program states it charges no commission.
What it is not: it is not a self-serve console like Google or Microsoft Merchant Center where you paste a feed URL and watch products go under review. You apply, and Perplexity decides whether and when to follow up. Set expectations accordingly.
Go to perplexity.ai, scroll to the footer and look for Merchant Program. It is not in the main navigation and does not appear in the app. The link opens the application form. You do not need a Perplexity Pro subscription to apply.
The form requires that you sell and ship to the United States. That is the only hard eligibility gate we saw. Submit, and note the date; there is no dashboard to check status afterwards.
The application does not take a file. What it can lead to is a request for your catalog, and across every shopping surface the common currency is the Google Shopping product feed format: one row per variant with id, title, description, link, image_link, price, availability, brand and identifiers. It is the file Google Merchant Center fetches, Microsoft imports, and Meta Commerce Manager schedules. Having it hosted at a stable public URL means you can answer a follow-up from Perplexity in one line instead of starting a project.
The free connect form builds that file from a WooCommerce or Shopify store URL, keyless, alongside the OpenAI-spec feed and a Shopify import CSV, and hosts it at /feeds/<your-domain>.google.tsv with a daily refresh.
Independently of the program, Perplexity cites pages from the open web, and it crawls with a user agent called PerplexityBot. Check your robots.txt does not block it (many “block all AI bots” rules do), confirm product pages return HTTP 200 without a login, and keep a sitemap published. For a WordPress store the sitemap at /sitemap.xml from your SEO plugin is enough. This is the part you control today, while the application waits.
Perplexity is a five-minute task with an unknown wait, so it goes after the two surfaces that approve within days. Our order for a non-Shopify store: Google Merchant Center (about an hour, up to three business days review), then Microsoft Merchant Center (twenty minutes, imports from Google), then this form, then Meta Commerce Manager if you have a Facebook business login. ChatGPT is its own track — feed-ready, application filed at chatgpt.com/merchants, and the Shopify Catalog route — covered in the ChatGPT Shopping guide. The one-day checklist puts all of them on one table.
Enter your store and we generate the Google-format feed, the OpenAI-spec feed and a Shopify import CSV from your public catalog in about a minute, keyless, hosted with a daily refresh. We prepare, validate and submit with you; each platform decides inclusion.
Free eligibility check — your feeds are generated on the spot. Want it done for you? Launch and Hosting pricing is on the homepage · how it works.
The program is free to join and charges no commission on sales; that is stated in the application itself. Shoppers who find a product in Perplexity click through to your own store. Nothing in the form asks for a card.
The form requires that you sell and ship to the United States. A non-US company that ships to US customers meets that; a store that does not ship to the US does not qualify today.
Perplexity does not publish a review time and does not confirm receipt in the form beyond the submission itself. Reports from merchants describe waits measured in weeks rather than days. Treat it as a queue you join once and do not depend on, and put the same hour into Google and Microsoft, which approve within days.
Not to submit the form: the five steps ask about the business, the contact, the website, the vertical and order volume, not for a file. Have a Google-format feed ready anyway, because that is the standard catalog format across shopping surfaces and it is what you will be able to offer if Perplexity follows up.
No. Applying puts your store in front of Perplexity’s review; what appears in answers, and when, is Perplexity’s decision. Independently of the program, keep your product pages crawlable by PerplexityBot so the assistant can cite them from the open web.