Google Weaves New Shopping Feature Into Search and Gemini

The company has begun testing new ad formats on its search AI mode that lets retailers offer products there, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (Feb. 11), citing a letter Google sent to the advertising community.

According to the report, Google now also lets users purchase products from Etsy and Wayfair within Gemini, while a new feature called Direct Offers within AI Mode will let brands offer discounts to potential customers.

“We aren’t just bringing ads to AI experiences in Search; we are reinventing what an ad is,” said Vidhya Srinivasan, the Google vice president overseeing ads and commerce.

The report noted that tech companies are trying to make money from AI chats as consumers grow accustomed to the technology, with ads and commerce helping finance their multi-billion dollar AI infrastructure projects.

This year, the report noted, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are scheduled to spend a record $650 billion on these efforts.

At the beginning of the year, Google began integrating AI agents into its shopping experience, with a new method that standardizes payments and digital identity, Srinivasan told Bloomberg.

The company is also working with the likes of Walmart, Target and Shopify on a protocol that helps consumers check out directly in Google’s AI products.

This “is helping to lay the foundation for a future where all commercial experiences can be seamless and agentic,” Srinivasan said, in reference to the potential for an artificial intelligence (AI) agent to do shopping on a customer’s behalf.

Google is making this effort at a time when more than 70% of consumers say they would use AI agents for shopping, as PYMNTS Intelligence research has shown.

“From Assistive to Agentic AI: Consumers Wade Into Autonomous Commerce,” the January installment of the Agentic AI Report Series, shows that consumers are increasingly comfortable in letting AI act on their behalf, to a point.

“The headline finding is not adoption alone. It is a conditional adoption. Consumers want agentic AI to reduce friction in daily life, manage complexity and handle recurring decisions,” PYMNTS wrote Wednesday.

However, that same report noted that as “AI systems move closer to payments, consumer confidence shifts away from novelty and toward familiar financial guardrails.”