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 money other than in a few rare cases. Usually it just wastes my time.
It's not a trick. What you receive as shipping or taxes on google shopping are not the final ones, google doesn't have your full address, neither doesn't have info from the merchant for all taxes (depends on the country) and shipping applied to the product to all possible locations.
There are very strict protections in place surrounding software’s use of a users address info. It’s not just a library call to access it (which the Shopping UI might do). Requires explicit user opt in on a per feature basis.
Holy gaslighting! Why do more reputable sites which don’t rank highly in the shopping results not have this problem? It’s specific to using the shopping results from search engines, I didn’t recently get a “checkout fee” on the Polk Audio manufacturer website directly, for example
google seems to know my exact age, my address, where I log in from often, but definitely the devices (unique ID) I use to connect. California voter here.
Started with a theory that it might be a possibility where google as a Ad business is trying to make money for their AI expenses from consumer. However after verifying the results for the items mentioned in the article plus some more and I DO NOT see any discrepancy in prices with either mode.
Dont want to call it clickbait right away, though its possible that it might be there before and Google fixed it OR the Author did not perform an apple to apple comparison, meaning its hard to verify if its same location and machine for both types of searches
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?
Also, not defending AI, but id gladly install a ublockoriginAI to filter out scam products and low quality knock offs. Would never trust google to do this.
In your example, any helmet by a manufacturer who has zero safety tests, regulatory stamps, warranty, etc, should be filtered out.
Any product with anomalous price needs heavy scrutiny.
GP included the word “specialized” which is a reputable manufacturer. Without seeing anything else, I’d automatically be inclined to believe that any helmets sold by them has warranty and safety tests.
Yes, I feel this is like when I look for a hotel and see a low price through a sketchy website but it is because it is a non-refundable member-only price. I wonder what the actual click through prices are. Sellers might try to serve higher prices to AI models but I'm not sure that would be useful to them.
Yeah and I know one issue with this is that sites like Amazon tend to have greater protections against scraping from AIs, so there is not much AI providers could do if they wanted to find the true lowest price.
I wonder when dynamic pricing based on the users chat history will be a thing. The users context based of LLM conversation should be way more detailed compared to traditional cookie tracking. Also buyers manipulation could be done at some point. Pretty scary to think about
dynamic/discriminatory pricing will be based on your chat history, your search history, you location, your purchase history, and every and any other data point that can be leveraged against you. Buying something near the birthday of a loved one? Expect prices to go up. Haven't driven in two days when you usually would have and now you're looking for a car part? Expect your prices to go up. Got a new job where you make more money? Expect your prices to go up.
The general implication is the opposite effect. The corporation wants to make more money. They make larger margins with this of course. But beyond that, the implication is that whatever sales are lost from the more expensive price are simply made up otherwise. If products are 20% more expensive but this only results in 10-15% less sales, the corporation is still very happy, particularly due to the margin bit. If loss impact is worse, they’ll usually retune how the product is ‘pitched’ in order to allow for this marginal boost.
I started to use TUIs to do this. Have them track "tracked" products in a local storage mechanism and otherwise browse the web as normal through a controlled browser. It's not optimal but it's the only way to have some control over what it's doing.
So are companies paying more to have products featured in AI mode rather than just plain search?
It sucks that Google seem to be phasing out plain search - for some specialized searches it ONLY gives me AI mode results, which are useless, and I have to go to Bing instead.
It's clearly part of the AI endgame that conversational AI output will sell an undisclosed promoted slant where possible. The money will not be left on the table. Regulation effectively no longer exists.
So Google is now a scammer - it scams elderly people for 21.6% higher cost, for the same product. Now we know how AI makes more revenue: it leeches off of people who don't know they are being scammed.
The solution is really easy (aside from having a government in the USA that stops milking the people - right now the orange clown is pocketing away money into his cronies, including Google and the other leeching US mega-corporations): Stop relying on Google. From A to Z.
I am aware that de-googling is very hard; I myself haven't yet completed that, but I also decided that eventually I will ban all of Google's impressive Evilness. Whenever an alternative exists that works at the least as well, I will use it.
I wish that purchase/shopping search engines were entirely separate and removed from general search engines. "are you searching for information or are you shopping?"
when I'm searching for information, so often results are just flooded with pricing from sellers.
It's crazy how getting the best deals online is still a unsolved problem. Google product page was garbage even before AI, most aggregators are a complete farce as well, either displaying deals that are out of date or completely unrelated items, and let's not even get started with price tracking...
You'd think of all the companies, Google would be the best one to come up with a good solution for deal hunting but no...
I guess it's in no company's interest for consumers to get the best deals...
> It's crazy how getting the best deals online is still a unsolved problem.
Not actually. Good deals are usually compensatation or a symptom of market forces. Additional costs in the form of marketing, advertising or risk aversion (bad or new vendors) are just some of the reasons that good deals exists.
That site exists in my country but under a different name (the UI is exactly the same so I imagine it's the same company). It's OK, but their search engine is mediocre. You look for Smartphone deals and they show you bananas... this is the very thing that shouldn't happen on a site like that. It means that whatever algorithm they use isn't very sophisticated.
The next question I'd ask is what the quality / reliability signal looks like. It is entirely possible that the results differ, but the organic search results are SEO'd garbage that lead to knock-offs, fell-off-the-trucks, or refurbs-sold-as-new.
But nonetheless, the fact they differ at all is an intriguing result.
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 money other than in a few rare cases. Usually it just wastes my time.
It's not a trick. What you receive as shipping or taxes on google shopping are not the final ones, google doesn't have your full address, neither doesn't have info from the merchant for all taxes (depends on the country) and shipping applied to the product to all possible locations.
What do you mean Google doesn’t have my full address? :)
There are very strict protections in place surrounding software’s use of a users address info. It’s not just a library call to access it (which the Shopping UI might do). Requires explicit user opt in on a per feature basis.
They may have my home address/current location, but that’s not necessarily where I am going to ship a given order.
Holy gaslighting! Why do more reputable sites which don’t rank highly in the shopping results not have this problem? It’s specific to using the shopping results from search engines, I didn’t recently get a “checkout fee” on the Polk Audio manufacturer website directly, for example
You missed the fees. Contact lenses can be shipped in a flat rate box. Taxes have a ceiling.
I 100% believe the sites are showing different prices to bots vs humans.
google seems to know my exact age, my address, where I log in from often, but definitely the devices (unique ID) I use to connect. California voter here.
Started with a theory that it might be a possibility where google as a Ad business is trying to make money for their AI expenses from consumer. However after verifying the results for the items mentioned in the article plus some more and I DO NOT see any discrepancy in prices with either mode.
Dont want to call it clickbait right away, though its possible that it might be there before and Google fixed it OR the Author did not perform an apple to apple comparison, meaning its hard to verify if its same location and machine for both types of searches
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?
Also, not defending AI, but id gladly install a ublockoriginAI to filter out scam products and low quality knock offs. Would never trust google to do this.
In your example, any helmet by a manufacturer who has zero safety tests, regulatory stamps, warranty, etc, should be filtered out.
Any product with anomalous price needs heavy scrutiny.
GP included the word “specialized” which is a reputable manufacturer. Without seeing anything else, I’d automatically be inclined to believe that any helmets sold by them has warranty and safety tests.
There's a blocklist for ublockorigin, but I can't really recommend it. It's a bit over-zealous and sometimes blocks useful stuff.
Link: https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
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.
Yes, I feel this is like when I look for a hotel and see a low price through a sketchy website but it is because it is a non-refundable member-only price. I wonder what the actual click through prices are. Sellers might try to serve higher prices to AI models but I'm not sure that would be useful to them.
Yeah and I know one issue with this is that sites like Amazon tend to have greater protections against scraping from AIs, so there is not much AI providers could do if they wanted to find the true lowest price.
I wonder if Amazon will lose enough sales to more bot-friendly vendors that they’ll notice this and do something about it?
As long as there are 200M American Prime subscribers who like two day shipping it seems unlikely.
I think it's a good thing if this forces manufacturers to list honest prices instead of inflated ones.
Then again, that makes it more expensive for the inconspicuous buyer who has no idea, which is a considerably larger population than HN readers.
Sure but in my own experience, the cheapest seller often means you are setting yourself up for headache if anything goes wrong.
It's easy to envision a parallel story about AI recommending sketchy vendors with no protections.
I wonder when dynamic pricing based on the users chat history will be a thing. The users context based of LLM conversation should be way more detailed compared to traditional cookie tracking. Also buyers manipulation could be done at some point. Pretty scary to think about
dynamic/discriminatory pricing will be based on your chat history, your search history, you location, your purchase history, and every and any other data point that can be leveraged against you. Buying something near the birthday of a loved one? Expect prices to go up. Haven't driven in two days when you usually would have and now you're looking for a car part? Expect your prices to go up. Got a new job where you make more money? Expect your prices to go up.
this feels to be inevitable...
Hey, that's actually a pretty useful feature if it helps discourage people from buying so much stuff!
The general implication is the opposite effect. The corporation wants to make more money. They make larger margins with this of course. But beyond that, the implication is that whatever sales are lost from the more expensive price are simply made up otherwise. If products are 20% more expensive but this only results in 10-15% less sales, the corporation is still very happy, particularly due to the margin bit. If loss impact is worse, they’ll usually retune how the product is ‘pitched’ in order to allow for this marginal boost.
I think the 10-15% hypothetical reduction in sales is their point, not the effect on corporate profits. Less consumer junk for the landfill is good.
I started to use TUIs to do this. Have them track "tracked" products in a local storage mechanism and otherwise browse the web as normal through a controlled browser. It's not optimal but it's the only way to have some control over what it's doing.
For me (brazilian reais) it always cut the price two digits
I’m building an agentic commerce platform where you can connect any model and the stores are served as MCP-UI components.
Finding the cheapest price for a product that isn’t fake is a completely unsolved problem and the entire premise of this is ridiculous
Or maybe the stores prices get adjusted (lower) based on few factors like being a human (not ai bot) and location and other factors?
So are companies paying more to have products featured in AI mode rather than just plain search?
It sucks that Google seem to be phasing out plain search - for some specialized searches it ONLY gives me AI mode results, which are useless, and I have to go to Bing instead.
It's clearly part of the AI endgame that conversational AI output will sell an undisclosed promoted slant where possible. The money will not be left on the table. Regulation effectively no longer exists.
So we're getting AInflation
My guess is that there are two different teams working on these.
I've also had issues with severely out of date product results.
I would never use AI for shopping. The incentives to mess with the results for commercial gain are too great.
So Google is now a scammer - it scams elderly people for 21.6% higher cost, for the same product. Now we know how AI makes more revenue: it leeches off of people who don't know they are being scammed.
The solution is really easy (aside from having a government in the USA that stops milking the people - right now the orange clown is pocketing away money into his cronies, including Google and the other leeching US mega-corporations): Stop relying on Google. From A to Z.
I am aware that de-googling is very hard; I myself haven't yet completed that, but I also decided that eventually I will ban all of Google's impressive Evilness. Whenever an alternative exists that works at the least as well, I will use it.
I dislike when unjustifiable precision in a headline is used to try to give some credibility to a defective analysis.
I wish that purchase/shopping search engines were entirely separate and removed from general search engines. "are you searching for information or are you shopping?"
when I'm searching for information, so often results are just flooded with pricing from sellers.
It's crazy how getting the best deals online is still a unsolved problem. Google product page was garbage even before AI, most aggregators are a complete farce as well, either displaying deals that are out of date or completely unrelated items, and let's not even get started with price tracking...
You'd think of all the companies, Google would be the best one to come up with a good solution for deal hunting but no...
I guess it's in no company's interest for consumers to get the best deals...
I made pretty good experienes with some of these popular price watching websites in my region; for typical day to day stuff, they work great.
For special things, I look up the current pricing landscape anyway.
> It's crazy how getting the best deals online is still a unsolved problem.
Not actually. Good deals are usually compensatation or a symptom of market forces. Additional costs in the form of marketing, advertising or risk aversion (bad or new vendors) are just some of the reasons that good deals exists.
For the UK, hotukdeals is pretty good
That site exists in my country but under a different name (the UI is exactly the same so I imagine it's the same company). It's OK, but their search engine is mediocre. You look for Smartphone deals and they show you bananas... this is the very thing that shouldn't happen on a site like that. It means that whatever algorithm they use isn't very sophisticated.
It's worse.
It's in Google's interest to auction ad spots at the highest price.
That's it.
Nothing else matters. The content needs to be vaguely legal, the quality or any other product feature doesn't matter.
Another platform, Facebook, makes about 10% of its income from scams. No manager or executive will willingly reduce their company's income by 10%.
That is interesting.
The next question I'd ask is what the quality / reliability signal looks like. It is entirely possible that the results differ, but the organic search results are SEO'd garbage that lead to knock-offs, fell-off-the-trucks, or refurbs-sold-as-new.
But nonetheless, the fact they differ at all is an intriguing result.
Am I the only one who's noticed "AI Mode" is dario's last name? A(mode)I?
Thank you for your time this evening.
Excellent work as always, Kojima