I tried Google’s New AI Shopping

written by Gagan Ghotra

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Last Updated

16 October Google announced new AI powered shopping experience and they said that it will be rolling out in US in coming weeks.

Even though I’m based in Melbourne, Australia today I managed to get into this early rollout using VPN.

Here is how it showed me when I searched for “best air purifiers for home”

When searched something it sort of do thinking for a minute or two and generate an AI answer.

While its doing processing it shows
– Searching all the product info to learn more
– Sifting through reviews
– Zeroing on the best options
– Crafting recommendations
– Just another moment

Then present the answer.

Seems that its looking through product info/reviews and somehow trying to figure out best options.

Also it displays Top insights summary generated using AI.
And have links to specific snippets from articles, Youtube videos and reviews on Google & third party sites too.
Here is how it looks …

Also another interesting thing about this new AI powered shopping experience is sometimes it cites Google’s Shopping Data – their Shopping Knowledge graph. I wonder how its using information from that in combination to products review information which is already available out there on the web to build a short summary & show relevant products to users.

After spending like an hour – trying out different queries and looking through what results its showing me. I don’t like it because AI answers are too basic and even information being cited is too basic. Its citing web pages which don’t show an real expertise of someone actually purchasing that product and writing about it from first hand experience of actually using it.

But in terms of UI I like this over Shopping UI that Google have right now.

Here is how it looks on desktop

And mobile

Let’s see if over time Google brings this to other countries too ……

Added on 24 Nov
Black Friday is right around the corner and many SEOs who have worked hard to rank their affiliate product pages to generate revenue throughout this holidays period are now competing with Google itself.
Because its showing “Shop Black Friday deals” at top of search results.

Added on 30 Nov
Also I think that Google using this new AI Shopping experience is going direct and eliminating the affiliate websites. Like they clearly have deals and gifts category pages in this new experience. Which otherwise is something that affiliate pages from different websites can rank for in the search results and generate income.

Also some other recent comments about this new Google AI powered Shopping experience.

Also I think that for Google right now main challenge is to build high quality in index which is being used by their different LLMs for generated summaries.

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