Payments giant PayPal has announced new features for its PayPal Honey browser extension. This follows the company’s recent partnership with Google on agentic commerce. The new features are designed to assist AI chatbot users who are researching items to purchase by providing them with Honey’s product recommendations, pricing information, and access to deals.
When a user asks a shopping-related question in their preferred AI chatbot, the PayPal Honey extension will display links to the recommended products. It will also show real-time pricing, different merchant options, and available offers. The system is intelligent enough to identify when an AI’s recommendations may have overlooked major retailers, and it will surface those additional options for the consumer.
These features aim to help consumers better compare prices while also boosting merchant sales through personalized offers. PayPal states that these agentic shopping integrations are designed to be compatible with various AI systems. They will initially work with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with plans to support more AI platforms in the future.
The company explains that this update is part of its broader rollout of agentic commerce initiatives. This larger strategy includes the Google partnership, an agentic commerce offering for developers, a remote MCP server, an Agent Toolkit, and several smaller deals. These other deals include an offer for a free year of Perplexity’s premium service and free access to PayPal’s new Comet browser.
However, the AI providers themselves are becoming competitors to products like Honey. As they develop their own systems for product recommendations and direct merchant connections, they present a new challenge. For example, OpenAI recently announced its own agentic shopping system designed to compete with Amazon and Google, which includes an “Instant Checkout” feature. While OpenAI’s system currently only supports Etsy, with plans for Shopify merchants soon, it signals a shift in consumer behavior. Instead of starting their shopping on the web or Amazon, users may begin their product research directly within an AI chatbot.
This launch comes after Honey received significant negative press. A YouTuber accused the company of stealing money from influencers by taking credit for sales that the creators had driven. This revelation has even led to several lawsuits.