Google AI Mode shows same products 21.6% more expensive than traditional search
A 23-day study by Productrise tracked over 2 million product listings across 100,000+ searches, comparing Google AI Mode with traditional search. When the exact same product appeared in both, AI Mode's price averaged 21.6% higher. AI Mode also surfaced pricier products overall (median $149 vs. $100) and showed little overlap with traditional search (1.28%). Prices disagreed 38.1% of the time, with AI Mode more expensive in two-thirds of those cases. The main seller differed nearly half the time, suggesting AI Mode uses different ranking criteria.
We're trading the visible effort of opening multiple windows for the invisible penalty of paying more without ever seeing the cheaper option that was one tab over.
- Aurornis
They’re using “traditional search” to mean the shopping specific search widget or page, which is a separate feature from traditional search. It aggregates retailer listings and sorts them by price.
The AI mode is based on normal top search results, which are oriented toward information about the product like the manufacturer’s page, which is usually going to be full MSRP.
So technically correct that the AI mode is not using the price ranking from the separate shopping mode, but the intent of the AI mode is to find information about the search term first and prices second. The intent of shopping mode is to find lowest prices first and not find any information about the product at all.
In my experience, shopping mode will show a lot of low prices that I can’t actually get because when I get to checkout shipping is $10 higher than anywhere else for some inexplicable reason, or the Google listing was tricked into showing a coupon code that doesn’t work with some exclusion message at checkout. The worst are the sites that show Googlebot a lower price on the indexing pass but then charge regular customers full price when you get there.
In some product areas these tricks are so widespread that every vendor uses them. Search for contact lenses at the lowest price and every single website will have a low price indexed by Google but will add a checkout fee to bring the price back up to full at checkout to cancel out the discount.
I haven’t found shopping mode to actually save me any mo […]
- Oras
I tried “mens cycling helmet specialized” via normal search and AI search.
On the surface, AI showed results of £45 while normal results showed £39.99 and this particular result didn’t show at all in the AI search, even when clicking more.
However, small fine print was the £39.99 had a £4.99 delivery. Can it be that AI is optimised for full price including shipping?
- WarmWash
At least in a few examples it looks like it is surfacing the manufacturers page, and then random 3rd parties have it cheaper, which is pretty commmon.
- bilalq
AI mode doesn't even search. I'll ask it to find a blog post or article that I remember reading recently. It often just fails to find it. But when it does, it'll mention the title and say to just go to the link to it. But it never gives me the link. This is a literal response I got from AI mode (with titles swapped out):
> If you search the term "<POSSIBLE_ARTICLE_TITLE>" or "<POSSIBLE_ARTICLE_TITLE>" on Hacker News or Google, you will find the exact write-up and the massive threads of founders sharing matching horror stories.
Of course, there are no threads on HackerNews for that if you search it. My response was to just google for me, and it links me to a random novel that doesn't even match the titles suggested.
- Sharlin
Hey, that's actually a pretty useful feature if it helps discourage people from buying so much stuff!