Google is increasing product search results, making it easier for consumers to price their purchase without leaving the search engine page results.
Search for an unbranded product such as “buy blue sundress for women” and scroll through sponsored listings and local results. Next, on the main SERP, Google added a grid of tile-like product boxes triggered by purchase intent queries. Each listing can include a product name, images, price, store name, average star ratings, and review count.
Product boxes appear in the top SERPs and can include product names, images, prices, store names, average star ratings, and review counts. Click on the image to enlarge it.
Tiles work differently than conventional organic results. Instead of sending shoppers to a product detail page on an e-commerce site, listings link to shopping knowledge panels that load into the SERP. Panels are similar to product detail pages, but with one big difference: Google applies a list of merchants with prices.
“This is especially helpful for users because they can compare prices much more easily,” says e-commerce SEO consultant Aleyda Solis. But for online stores, it’s another hurdle to getting the click.
How Google ranks product listings is still unclear. But they are filled with structure data: Schema.org markup or similar. SEO consultants and e-commerce store owners have struggled for years about what types of structured data are worth publishing because Google wasn’t paying attention to all of them.
But last February, Google expanded support for structured product data, announcing new shipping and return classes and product variants such as sizes, colors and materials. This is likely to bury skirmishes over the value of structured data, as visibility into product grids and shopping knowledge dashboards depends on it.
Shopping knowledge boards
In shopping knowledge panels, the store name in the product listing gets the first rank in the merchant list. But size, color and other sorting options allow shoppers to reorder the merchant list by these variants.
The sorting feature is likely to incentivize shop owners to get their scheme together or disappear from the merchant list. Shoppers using the feature could inadvertently filter out merchants who ignore product variants.
Shopping Insights panels are loaded directly into the SERPs and contain sort options that reorder the list of merchants. Click on the image to enlarge it.
“If you have technical limitations or don’t have a developer, there are tools that make it easy to implement product schema markup. Wordlift is one of them. The Schema app is another,” says Solís. You can also use ChatGPT to generate a product schema.
For e-commerce merchants, the Shopping Insights dashboard diminishes the importance of unique landing pages. Many searchers will likely jump directly from the product grid to the shopping knowledge panel to a merchant’s product detail page.
The development could be a win for Amazon, which will appear on more product knowledge panels because of the breadth and depth of its catalog. Additionally, Amazon could use predatory pricing to undercut smaller e-commerce stores in merchant listings.
Last September, Squarespace acquired Google’s domain name registration business. “Maybe Google thinks we won’t need domains anymore,” speculates Ross Kernez, a digital strategist. “If everything becomes SGE [Search Generative Experience] and only e-commerce survives, the top of the funnel will disappear. Transactional queries will still be here, but that means people might need fewer domains,” says Kernez.
Mike King, CEO of marketing agency iPullRank, disagrees. “We heard about the death of websites when mobile apps appeared. People said we won’t need websites anymore. Everything will be an application. Well, that didn’t happen,” says King.
Reduced value?
Either way, mainstream organic listings are coming in further below the fold. With AI results, paid shopping, pay-per-click ads, map packs, forums, image carousels, and now product grids, it’s possible to secure top traditional organic rankings and receive less traffic.
With the rise of ChatGPT, the growth of search for product reviews on TikTok and Instagram, and the recent completion of its March core update, it appears that Google is reinventing web search and perhaps diminishing the value of search organic as a marketing channel.
The result could force marketers to prioritize other traffic sources like social media, email marketing and generative AI optimization.
Google’s huge audience cannot be ignored. But with so much volatility in the SERPs, diversifying your ecommerce traffic sources is becoming increasingly important. I don’t see any evidence that e-commerce merchants are shifting organic search resources to TikTok, ChatGPT, Reddit, and Facebook. But relying heavily on organic traffic seems increasingly risky.
