Google wants to make shopping simpler and faster this holiday season. “Shopping still involves a lot of drudgery,” Vidya Srinivasan, vp and gm of ads and commerce at Google, said at a Google roundtable event on November 12. “We spend way too much time doing things like looking for deals or going through lots of filters only to find that you can’t really get it down to the thing that you want.”
Announced on Thursday, the company is introducing new tools in Google Search and its Gemini app that aim to make browsing, comparing and buying products more natural. “We see people shop on Google more than a billion times a day,” Srinivasan said. “Our focus is to make all of these experiences both helpful and dependable. People really care about pricing. They care about selection. And they care about trust.”
The biggest update is to Google Search’s AI Mode, which lets people describe what they are looking for in everyday language instead of using keywords. “Starting today (November 13), we’re going to announce a major upgrade to AI Mode that pairs our latest Gemini models with our Shopping Graph to make it even easier to shop in this conversational way,” Lillian Rincon, vp of product for Google Shopping, said during the roundtable. She explained that AI Mode “will show you new, contextually dynamic results based on your needs in the moment, and then intelligently guide you to the right product.”
Instead of typing “noise-canceling headphones,” for example, shoppers can now say something like, “help me find headphones for working from home that help me focus but still let me hear the doorbell.”
“This is not the way people typically think and talk to each other,” Srinivasan said. “You can just say what’s on your mind as it comes to you.”
AI Mode is built on Google’s Shopping Graph, which Srinivasan described as “our data set of what’s happening with shopping in the world, powered by an unmatched selection, given the number of merchants and retailers we partner with.” Every hour, the system updates more than 2 billion listings, so the results always show what is in stock, she said.
AI Mode can also help with product comparisons. “Here are the top face creams for winter chapped skin,” Rincon said while showing a demo of La Roche Posay’s products and Dr Jart’s Ceramidin cream. “I see the model is able to show me the most important ingredients, and summarize what reviewers are saying about this and key ingredients to look for. I can also ask to compare these, and it’s going to create a table that summarizes the two products, with texture, feel and primary benefit.”
Shopping is also expanding within the Gemini app, which now allows users to plan and shop within the same chat. “Starting on Thursday, Gemini app users will be able to seamlessly move from brainstorming to browsing, all in the same conversation,” Rincon said. “Maybe you’re looking for inspiration for Black Friday or helping make a holiday list on a budget. The Gemini app will move beyond simple text suggestions and offer helpful shopping ideas.”
Another part of the update is what Google calls agentic AI, or technology that can take actions for you, like tracking prices or buying products. “We think of agentic AI as a type of AI that can take action on your behalf,” Srinivasan said. “It comes into play when we’re trying to delegate the tedious aspects of shopping — things like price tracking or finding what’s in stock.”
The new agentic checkout feature can track an item’s price and even buy it automatically once it hits the user’s budget, effectively leaving the customer out of the purchase process. To qualify for Google’s agentic shopping features, merchants must support guest checkout and Google Pay for purchases, and ensure their business hours and contact details are up to date for local store calls.
“You can tap the ‘track price’ button to set up a personalized price drop alert,” Rincon said, explaining the customer experience. “When the price drops in your desired range from any merchant across the web, we’re going to send you an alert, and if that merchant is eligible, you can also give Google permission to buy it for you.”
In October, Amazon also began testing a built-in price-tracking feature on mobile product pages that shows recent price highs and lows, mirroring Google’s new price-drop tracking and auto-buy tools.
A related feature, agentic calling, saves time by letting Google contact stores to check if a product is in stock. “We’re introducing a new feature that uses agentic AI to call local businesses on your behalf to find out if the store carries a certain product, how much it costs, and if there are any special promos,” Rincon said. When a shopper selects “Let Google call,” the AI uses Google’s Duplex technology to place a real phone call to nearby stores, clearly identifying itself before asking about price, availability and promotions. The system then summarizes the store associate’s responses and sends the shopper a text or email with the key details and local inventory options.
These updates come as Google continues to blur the line between search and shopping. In May, the company previewed a feature called Search Checkout, which lets users buy items directly from Google Search results. As reported in Glossy’s Fashion Briefing in June, this kind of shopping could speed up sales but also reduce traffic to brand websites, meaning fewer opportunities to collect customer data or build loyalty.
Industry experts say this puts Google closer to competitors like OpenAI-owned ChatGPT and TikTok, which are also moving toward direct shopping experiences. Large language models are changing how people find and buy things, replacing website clicks with quick answers in chat-style searches. As Holden Bale, chief strategy officer at consultancy Merkle, told Glossy in June, “If the consumer completes a purchase in search without ever touching the brand site, you lose the chance to build trust.”
For now, Google says it is not becoming a retailer. But by linking its AI tools with its massive product catalog, it is moving closer to controlling every step of the shopping process. As Srinivasan put it, “Shopping should feel and can feel a lot more natural and easy. We want to hold on to all the fun parts of shopping and skip the tedious, hard parts.”
