Perplexity Shopping nears $2B GMV run rate and opens a free Merchant Program

Perplexity's shopping layer is maturing from an experiment into a standalone channel. Agency estimates now put the annualized gross merchandise value running through its product recommendation cards at roughly $2 billion, according to The Keyword (proprietary data, not confirmed by Perplexity). Pairing that with a recently opened free Merchant Program, the picture for independent sellers is clearer than ever: AI discovery is no longer a side project.

Perplexity's answer pages pair an AI-written recommendation with unsponsored product cards that are ranked by relevance, not ad spend. Product feeds—mainly pulled through platforms like Shopify—feed those answers. Around its checkout, the company added a one-click "Buy with Pro" flow and a free Merchant Program that bundles in an API access tier and a trends dashboard with no transaction fee.

The strategic shift has three parts. First, placement is relevance-ranked rather than paid, so being inside the answer depends on clean, complete, current product data—not on bidding. Second, because the channel is free to join, the barrier is not budget but data quality: sparse descriptions and stale prices push your products out of the candidate pool. Third, it formalizes a trend merchants have felt all year: buyers increasingly discover through AI answers before ever visiting a storefront.

For cross-border sellers, the implication is that localized, parseable product data is now a distribution decision, not a nice-to-have. If the same product exists identically in a global feed, an assistant comparing options has little reason to single out any one listing.

A relevance-ranked, fee-free shopping surface rewards exactly the signals Visora scans for. Clean structured data, current offers, and complete spec fields are what keep a product in the candidate pool when an assistant is assembling an answer. A free audit at geovisora.com/audit shows which product fields are sparse or stale on your pages, so the merchant program is worth more to sellers who fix those gaps before volume lands.