• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Google continually updates its homepage with AI integrated into its search features as it moves deeper into the technology and offers more AI options.

The move signals to advertisers that Google has given in to AI’s appeal based on the direction of CEO Sundar Pichai, despite the technology's persistent flaws.

Online brands may be hit hardest by Google’s AI shift, as recent data signals a major disruption in organic product visibility and consistency across platforms.

An analysis released this week by ecommerce SEO provider Productrise identified one of those challenges in the differences between traditional search and Google AI Mode.

The company tracked more than 2 million product listings across more than 100,000 SERPs (search engine results page) and AI Mode responses for product-specific searches in AI Mode and regular search on the same day, in the U.S. and U.K.

The same shopping queries were entered on Google AI Mode and traditional search on the same day at the same moment.

When the same product showed up on both, the product price in AI Mode was 21.6% more expensive on average.

The Productrise study, which analyzed data from Aug. 9 through Aug. 31, suggests the discrepancy did not occur because Google artificially inflates product prices, but was due to the shift in its ranking algorithm.

While Google's traditional Search carousel favors the lowest price, Productrise founder Hugo Huijer says the least expensive price for products in AI Mode is not a factor.

When the same product appears in both engines, the two product prices are different 38.1% of the time, while AI Mode is the higher price 68.4% of the time. 

When AI Mode is the more expensive product, the difference in the median price is 22.2%.

The average is 88.5%, but that figure is heavily influenced by extreme outliers.

As an example, a used item in traditional search matched against a new one in AI Mode.

AI Mode served far fewer products, so it made up a much smaller share of all the listings tracked.

This is in line with the findings of a previous Productrise study.

In the current data set, AI Mode makes up 12.3% of all the products shown, with an average of 3.9 products versus 27.8 in traditional search.

There also is very little product overlap between AI Mode and traditional search.

Even when both sides respond to the same search, they rarely show the same products on the same day, according to the data.

The data found that only 1.28% of products ranking in traditional search also appeared in AI Mode.

Productrise's July study found a similar pattern, with AI Mode ranking around 5% of the products that rank in traditional search overall.

Google told Futurism it has not yet verified the accuracy of claims in this report. All shopping results on Google Search, including AI Mode and the search results page, are powered by the same data source, Google Shopping Graph.