What happened to ChatGPT Instant Checkout?

OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in September 2025, letting people buy inside ChatGPT, and retired it in March 2026, saying the initial version did not offer the flexibility it aspired to. ChatGPT refocused on product discovery, with checkout moving back to merchants. The underlying Agentic Commerce Protocol, developed with Stripe, remains an open standard for feeding product data to assistants.

What did the Ninth Circuit rule about Perplexity's Comet agent?

On August 5, 2026 the Ninth Circuit overturned an injunction that had banned Perplexity's Comet agent from shopping on Amazon. The court held that when an AI agent acts on a user's instructions, the user, not the software, is accessing the platform, so it is not unauthorized access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The ruling weakens platforms' ability to block third-party agents.

Do AI assistants install apps for users today?

Not autonomously on iOS. Assistants shortlist apps and hand the user a link to the App Store or Google Play; the user completes the install. Browser agents can open a store page on the web. The near-term shift is that the assistant, not the store, decides which two or three apps a user sees.

How does install attribution survive when an agent sends the user?

The same way it survives any referral: the link must carry an identifier. On Android, a click ID in the Google Play install referrer is read by the app on first launch and matched deterministically. On iOS, a ref code or campaign token on the App Store link plus SDK fingerprint matching does the job. If the agent follows a creator's tracking link, the creator is credited; if it follows a bare store link, the install looks organic.

How much do people trust agents to spend for them?

Very little so far. Research summarized by Exploding Topics found shoppers use AI heavily for research (68.5%) but the median amount they would trust an agent to spend autonomously was $50, with the most common answer being $0. That trust gap is the main reason checkout returned to merchants while discovery stayed in the assistant.

Agentic Commerce Is Coming for App Installs: What Happens When the Assistant Chooses the App

The short version

"Agentic commerce" had a loud 2025 and a sobering 2026. The facts as of late August:

ChatGPT Instant Checkout launched in September 2025 and was retired in March 2026, less than six months later. OpenAI said the initial version "did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide" and moved ChatGPT's focus to product discovery, with checkout handed back to merchants. The Agentic Commerce Protocol it was built on, co-developed with Stripe, remains an open standard for feeding product data into assistants (Exploding Topics; OpenAI).
Trust, not technology, was the limit. Shoppers use AI for research (68.5%) but the median amount they would let an agent spend on its own was $50, and the most common answer was $0, per the research Exploding Topics summarizes.
Perplexity's Comet agent won in court. On August 5, 2026 the Ninth Circuit overturned an injunction that had banned Comet from shopping on Amazon, holding that an agent acting on a user's instructions is legally the user and "a tool doing a user's bidding does not fit" the definition of unauthorized access (The Next Web, August 2026). Perplexity had raised $200 million for Comet two months earlier.
Assistants already move purchases. Sensor Tower's State of AI 2026 report (June 16) found Amazon Rufus users convert at nearly twice the rate of non-users and that generative AI referrals to shopping sites rose across every major retail category from Q4 2024 to Q1 2026 (Sensor Tower). Google's AI Mode passed one billion monthly users with query volume more than doubling each quarter (Search Engine Land, June 2026).

So the 2026 shape is: the assistant decides, the human confirms, the merchant completes. For app developers that is not a future scenario. It is how a growing share of installs already start.

How an app install goes agentic

Today, in order of how common it is:

The assistant shortlists. "Which app should I use to split rent with roommates?" returns two or three names. The March 2026 AI App Discoverability Index found only 16.2% of recommended apps appear across all four major assistants and the top 100 apps take 38.1% of mentions. Being on the shortlist is the new "ranking on page one."
The assistant links. A store link, sometimes a deep link, sometimes a creator's review it cited. The user taps.
The user installs. On iOS the App Store completes it; on Android, Google Play. No assistant installs an iOS app autonomously in 2026, and the trust data suggests users would not want one to.
Coming: the agent goes to the store itself. Browser agents like Comet can already open a store page on the web on instruction. The Ninth Circuit ruling means platforms have fewer legal tools to stop them.

The install itself has not changed. What changed is who makes the shortlist and what they read to make it.

What the assistant reads

Assistants build shortlists from third-party descriptions of your app, not from your listing. In the discoverability index, 62.4% of Perplexity's app citations were editorial roundups and 14.2% were YouTube; Jellyfish data reported in August 2026 puts YouTube creator content in more than 25% of AI assistant responses (Carusele, August 2026).

That is the strategic point for anyone selling apps in 2026: creator content is both a conversion channel and the training material for the agents that will do the recommending. A creator video that names the app, states the job and shows it working converts viewers today and gets quoted by assistants tomorrow. Nothing else in the marketing mix does both.

How attribution survives the agent

The uncomfortable question for performance marketers: if an assistant sends the user to the store, who gets credit, and can you even tell?

The answer is the same as for any referral. Attribution survives if the link carries an identifier.

Path	What the link carries	Attribution outcome
Assistant cites a creator's review and links the creator's tracking link	Click ID in the Play install referrer (Android) or a ref code / campaign token (iOS)	Deterministic on Android; ref code plus fingerprint on iOS. Creator credited, developer pays per install
Assistant links the bare store page	Nothing	Install looks organic. Nobody credited, nothing paid
Agent navigates to the store on instruction	Whatever URL it was given	Same as above: depends on the URL

Two implications. First, deterministic attribution matters more, not less, as more traffic arrives through paths you do not control. On Android, the Google Play Install Referrer carries the click ID into the app on first launch and the match is exact; on iOS, ref codes and SDK fingerprinting do the work. Second, the creator's link is the only version of your store URL that assistants have a reason to cite, because it lives inside the review they are quoting. Bare store links get cited too, but they pay nobody and teach you nothing.

IdeaEquity handles both halves: creators produce the reviews that assistants read, and the SDK (iOS, native Android, React Native, or AppsFlyer postbacks) attributes the install back to the creator whether the tap came from a Short, a Threads post or an assistant's answer. You pay per verified install either way.

What to do this quarter

Get on the shortlist. Be in the roundups, get creators to say the name and the job, keep the entity consistent, say "free" if it is true. Full plan in How AI Assistants Recommend Apps in 2026.
Make every link you control carry an identifier. Creator links already do. Add campaign tokens to the store links in your own content and press kit.
Instrument the install, not just the click. SDK on both platforms, or MMP postbacks, so an assistant-referred install is measured the same as any other.
Report signups and purchases. As installs get cheaper to trigger and harder to source, the events after install are what tell you which channel, creator or assistant sends users worth paying for.
Do not build for autonomous checkout yet. The $0 modal trust answer and the Instant Checkout retirement say the same thing: the human still confirms. Optimize for being chosen, not for being bought unattended.

The longer view

The Ninth Circuit's logic, that an agent acting for a user is the user, removes the main legal defense platforms had against third-party agents. Combined with AI Mode's growth and assistants' referral share in retail, the direction is clear even if the timeline is not: more of the top of the funnel will be decided by software reading what people said about your app.

The developers in the best position are the ones whose apps have the most honest, specific, human descriptions in circulation, and who can attribute the install no matter which path it took. That is a creator strategy and an attribution strategy, and they are the same strategy.

Be the app the assistant picks, and know when it did. Create a campaign on IdeaEquity.

Sources: Exploding Topics, "ChatGPT Instant Checkout is dead. Long live AI shopping"; OpenAI, "Buy it in ChatGPT"; The Next Web, Ninth Circuit ruling on Perplexity Comet, August 5, 2026; Sensor Tower State of AI 2026, June 16, 2026; Search Engine Land, June 2026; AI App Discoverability Index 2026; Carusele, August 2026.