Google is not a retailer or even a marketplace, but it has played a central role in online shopping for decades. More than 1 billion shopping searches happen on the platform every day, yet Google has never been the endpoint — and it doesn’t want to be.
“Google shopping is an ecosystem,” explained Lilian Rincon, VP of Shopping Experiences at Google, on this week’s episode of the Retail Remix podcast. “We’re trying to make sure that consumers have access to all the products across the world, regardless of if it’s from the little store down the street or the big retailer.”
While the goal may not have changed, how Google is going about achieving it has changed dramatically over the past two years with the rise of AI, multimodal search and agentic experiences. In this episode, Lilian details how shopper search behavior has shifted as a result of these technological advancements (for example, AI Mode searches are 2X-3X longer than traditional search queries), and how Google is refining its products as a result.
At the moment, Google is taking a measured, targeted approach to advancements like agentic commerce: “We spend a lot of time researching what are the things that really could be helpful with regards to shopping?” she said. “So a lot of the agentic things that you see us focused on are tackling real user problems. For example, we started with agentic buying behind the track-price [feature] because that was a key user need that we saw.”
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Tune in to hear how Google is thinking about these evolutions in ecommerce and what’s coming next on the experience front, including:
- New agentic features that can check stock, call local stores and even buy on your behalf.
- A look inside Try-on-You, Google’s new personalized virtual try-on that uses a single selfie to visualize clothing on your actual body;
- Why conversational shopping has officially arrived — and how it is changing the way people search; and
- The critical role of Google’s Shopping Graph in powering trustworthy AI results.
Listen here or anywhere you get your podcasts:
