Google’s shopping update wants to help you get dressed — putting the tech company in direct competition with ChatGPT.
Earlier this week, Google announced the forthcoming ‘AI Mode’ shopping experience, a chat-style interface that enables users to converse back and forth with Google’s artificial intelligence tool. Those who have used generative AI agents like ChatGPT and Perplexity — and Google’s AI assistant, Gemini — will be familiar. Google’s AI Mode offers an additional layer — commerce — by combining Google’s Gemini capabilities with its Shopping Graph, which has over 50 billion continually refreshed product listings. It’s not available yet, but will be in the coming months, according to Google.
Other updates include agent-guided checkout, which will help users track price drops to instantly purchase a product when it’s within their budget; and the ability to virtually try on garments through users’ uploaded photographs. (Virtual try-on was previously on offer using available models with different body types.) But the update generating the most chatter is the shopping function’s forthcoming conversational capabilities.
“Because AI Mode can recall previous questions, you can ask follow-ups and really narrow in your results,” says Lilian Rincon, vice president of consumer shopping product. “The new right hand panel dynamically updates with relevant and personalised products as you ask follow up questions, helping you pinpoint exactly what you’re looking for and discover new brands.” This personalisation is key, she adds. “We have been personalising shopping results in new ways over the past few years, based on things like your signed in activity across surfaces.”
Google has been in the AI shopping game for some time. In October 2024, Google implemented a series of generative AI updates to its Shopping tab. These included AI-generated “briefs”, top product recommendations, a personalised inspiration feed and deal finding. Already, if you search on the Google Shopping tab, it will offer a sponsored selection at the top; a line of information “researched with AI”; product options grouped by category; then, “all products”. I searched for a “yellow dress for a summer wedding in Santa Barbara”. Beneath the sponsored results, it told me: “Summer weddings in Santa Barbara often call for semi-formal or cocktail attire, making a yellow midi or maxi dress in a lightweight and breathable fabric like cotton or silk a perfect choice.” It offered cocktail dresses, midi dresses and maxi styles, followed by a broad mix of all three. Save for the “researched with AI” label on the text box, you wouldn’t necessarily clock that the rest of the results are impacted by AI tools as well.
However, Google’s incorporation of AI will now be much more visible by virtue of the chat feature. Previously, many users won’t even have realised that Google has been layering AI into its shopping results because all they saw was enhanced search snippets, not a chat-style interface, says Martin Balaam, CEO and founder of digital commerce software company Pimberly. “Until very recently, AI-powered shopping felt more like Google performing behind-the-scenes relevance tuning rather than an explicit conversational experience, so adoption stayed low among less tech-savvy shoppers,” he says. Because the interaction itself didn’t change, awareness was low too, adds Nina Goli, head of digital strategy at tech agency Modern Citizens.
When OpenAI launched its ChatGPT shopping updates last month, experts and users alike were optimistic because of the conversational nature of the tool (it’s baked into the ChatGPT interface that many have already been experimenting with this past year). If I wasn’t happy with the yellow wedding guest dress options, I could’ve told it why, and asked for more suggestions. This process is emotional, which means it’s engaging and sticky. That Google’s conversational tool will tie its responses back into Google’s massive shopping index and real-time pricing, is a convenience that Balaam expects will drive users back towards Google. It’s Google’s infrastructure, trust and daily relevance — at this point, it’s a habit for many — that positions it to successfully capture user attention, Goli agrees. ‘Google it’ is, after all, still part of most of our daily lexicon.
Already, for early testers, AI Mode queries are two to three times as long as traditional Search queries. It shows people are delving deeper and asking more conversational questions, Rincon says. “We’re seeing that people are using AI Mode for help with more exploratory and complicated tasks, like shopping comparisons, recommendations, how-tos and travel and local planning,” she adds.
But even so, Goli flags, AI Mode isn’t a shoo-in. “Now, it has to deliver on tone,” she says. “If it simply re-skins traditional search, it misses the opportunity to reshape how people discover and decide.”
The ad paradox
Whereas ChatGPT’s shopping tool is ad free (at least for the moment), Google’s includes sponsored products. They’re labelled as such, and woven in with the non-paid-for results.
Experts aren’t convinced that the ad inclusion will be a negative for shoppers — or at least, it’s unlikely to be a deterrent. They’re used to seeing sponsored content across platforms, Google included, Balaam says. Ironically, this could increase trust relative to ChatGPT’s no-sponcon stance, he says. “ChatGPT could be seen with some scepticism by consumers who may be concerned that no such openness as to why content is being surfaced in what order — especially as ChatGPT has already floated that it is considering ways to monetise, and product placement is one of the obvious and easiest places to start.”
That said, there’s always a worry that Google’s regular search results — ads included — might impact the products pulled through in AI Mode. (Google’s Rincon says that, in AI Mode, you will see organic results that are not influenced by ads.) “There’s a legitimate worry from some that AI layers could further entrench Google’s advertising ecosystem, surfacing paid listings at the top of ‘objective’ conversational cards,” Balaam says. This is the point at which users’ trust in Google as a search engine won’t matter, Goli adds. “Trust is powerful, but conditional,” she says. “If users sense that commercial bias shapes responses, trust won’t hold. Transparency and quality of experience will define whether this edge lasts.”
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