Google AI Mode shows same products 21.6% more expensive than traditional search

Posted by DeepLogin 4 days ago

Comments

Comment by Aurornis 4 days ago

They’re using “traditional search” to mean the shopping specific search widget or page, which is a separate feature from traditional search. It aggregates retailer listings and sorts them by price.

The AI mode is based on normal top search results, which are oriented toward information about the product like the manufacturer’s page, which is usually going to be full MSRP.

So technically correct that the AI mode is not using the price ranking from the separate shopping mode, but the intent of the AI mode is to find information about the search term first and prices second. The intent of shopping mode is to find lowest prices first and not find any information about the product at all.

In my experience, shopping mode will show a lot of low prices that I can’t actually get because when I get to checkout shipping is $10 higher than anywhere else for some inexplicable reason, or the Google listing was tricked into showing a coupon code that doesn’t work with some exclusion message at checkout. The worst are the sites that show Googlebot a lower price on the indexing pass but then charge regular customers full price when you get there.

In some product areas these tricks are so widespread that every vendor uses them. Search for contact lenses at the lowest price and every single website will have a low price indexed by Google but will add a checkout fee to bring the price back up to full at checkout to cancel out the discount.

I haven’t found shopping mode to actually save me any money other than in a few rare cases. Usually it just wastes my time.

Comment by base 4 days ago

It's not a trick. What you receive as shipping or taxes on google shopping are not the final ones, google doesn't have your full address, neither doesn't have info from the merchant for all taxes (depends on the country) and shipping applied to the product to all possible locations.

Comment by bronlund 4 days ago

What do you mean Google doesn’t have my full address? :)

Comment by kridsdale1 4 days ago

There are very strict protections in place surrounding software’s use of a users address info. It’s not just a library call to access it (which the Shopping UI might do). Requires explicit user opt in on a per feature basis.

Comment by apefulsin 4 days ago

Is that GDPR? Is it still true in America?

Comment by esyir 4 days ago

There are internal controls as to the use of personal data within Google. Contrary to the popular opinion, personal data is not actually a free for all within Google

Comment by warkdarrior 4 days ago

Not only Google does know your full address, but it also knows which corner of which room you are cowering in.

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by Aurornis 4 days ago

The trick is the fees.

Google shopping result might show an accurate shipping fee, but at checkout you will notice a $50 fee that exactly makes up the difference between the retail price and their Google Shopping indexed price.

Comment by californical 4 days ago

Holy gaslighting! Why do more reputable sites which don’t rank highly in the shopping results not have this problem? It’s specific to using the shopping results from search engines, I didn’t recently get any “surprise fee” on the Polk Audio manufacturer website directly, for example

Comment by picofarad 4 days ago

You missed the fees. Contact lenses can be shipped in a flat rate box. Taxes have a ceiling.

I 100% believe the sites are showing different prices to bots vs humans.

Comment by mistrial9 4 days ago

google seems to know my exact age, my address, where I log in from often, but definitely the devices (unique ID) I use to connect. California voter here.

Comment by solarkraft 3 days ago

It’s obviously a trick.

Comment by keeda 4 days ago

Maybe not the same thing you’re seeing, but hiding the margin in shipping fees is a common and time-honored technique on e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay. Find any regular product, sort by price lowest-to-highest, and witness the number of very cheap items that look like an amazing deal… until you see the shipping charges. At which point it is as or often more expensive than the higher priced items + shipping.

It must be working on some unsuspecting shoppers because those listings are all over the place. There seems to be no policy against them either, and of course those items are never eligible for Prime shipping. To its credit, at least Amazon these days shows you the shipping costs on the product page itself, as opposed to finding out at checkout.

Comment by crazygringo 4 days ago

On eBay for certain scammy sellers, but not as a general rule.

And on Amazon, certainly not for items sold by Amazon or part of Prime. Again, only scammy third-party sellers.

Comment by keeda 4 days ago

I guess by definition if they’re doing such things they’re scammy… and aren’t 3rd party sellers the biggest contingent of sellers on Amazon? I mean, I found such listings for almost all of the things I recently shopped for, including water bottles, cooking appliances, sports shorts, coffee cups, camping chairs, usb drives, video cables, beach sandals, winter wear, multivitamin supplements…

Not quite a scientific study, but I always sort by cheapest just to check and see this pattern every time.

The distinction you make is technically correct, but a does not lessen the scale at which it is happening.

Comment by crazygringo 1 day ago

I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, and 99.9% of it has free shipping. I've had to pay a shipping fee maybe 3 times over the past decade, if I'm guessing?

Even if there are tons of scammy expensive-shipping listings, if people are almost never buying them and they almost never get surfaced in search results, it doesn't matter.

But I've also never even tried sorting by cheapest, because default sorting by relevance has always worked for me.

Comment by Oras 4 days ago

I tried “mens cycling helmet specialized” via normal search and AI search.

On the surface, AI showed results of £45 while normal results showed £39.99 and this particular result didn’t show at all in the AI search, even when clicking more.

However, small fine print was the £39.99 had a £4.99 delivery. Can it be that AI is optimised for full price including shipping?

Comment by cyanydeez 4 days ago

Also, not defending AI, but id gladly install a ublockoriginAI to filter out scam products and low quality knock offs. Would never trust google to do this.

In your example, any helmet by a manufacturer who has zero safety tests, regulatory stamps, warranty, etc, should be filtered out.

Any product with anomalous price needs heavy scrutiny.

Comment by kccqzy 4 days ago

GP included the word “specialized” which is a reputable manufacturer. Without seeing anything else, I’d automatically be inclined to believe that any helmets sold by them has warranty and safety tests.

Comment by thrance 4 days ago

There's a blocklist for ublockorigin, but I can't really recommend it. It's a bit over-zealous and sometimes blocks useful stuff.

Link: https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

Comment by Legend2440 4 days ago

>Also, not defending AI, but id gladly install a ublockoriginAI to filter out scam products and low quality knock offs.

I'm still waiting for an AI-powered adblock that removes ads by their semantic content instead of a fixed rule list.

I think I'll be waiting a while though because of the performance cost of running an LLM.

Comment by WarmWash 4 days ago

At least in a few examples it looks like it is surfacing the manufacturers page, and then random 3rd parties have it cheaper, which is pretty commmon.

Comment by ellisv 4 days ago

Yes, I feel this is like when I look for a hotel and see a low price through a sketchy website but it is because it is a non-refundable member-only price. I wonder what the actual click through prices are. Sellers might try to serve higher prices to AI models but I'm not sure that would be useful to them.

Comment by JeremyBarbosa 4 days ago

Yeah and I know one issue with this is that sites like Amazon tend to have greater protections against scraping from AIs, so there is not much AI providers could do if they wanted to find the true lowest price.

Comment by skybrian 4 days ago

I wonder if Amazon will lose enough sales to more bot-friendly vendors that they’ll notice this and do something about it?

Comment by SR2Z 4 days ago

As long as there are 200M American Prime subscribers who like two day shipping it seems unlikely.

Comment by consp 4 days ago

Then again, that makes it more expensive for the inconspicuous buyer who has no idea, which is a considerably larger population than HN readers.

Comment by WarmWash 4 days ago

Sure but in my own experience, the cheapest seller often means you are setting yourself up for headache if anything goes wrong.

It's easy to envision a parallel story about AI recommending sketchy vendors with no protections.

Comment by qurren 4 days ago

I think it's a good thing if this forces manufacturers to list honest prices instead of inflated ones.

Comment by Sharlin 4 days ago

Hey, that's actually a pretty useful feature if it helps discourage people from buying so much stuff!

Comment by danvayn 4 days ago

The general implication is the opposite effect. The corporation wants to make more money. They make larger margins with this of course. But beyond that, the implication is that whatever sales are lost from the more expensive price are simply made up otherwise. If products are 20% more expensive but this only results in 10-15% less sales, the corporation is still very happy, particularly due to the margin bit. If loss impact is worse, they’ll usually retune how the product is ‘pitched’ in order to allow for this marginal boost.

Comment by jittles 4 days ago

I think the 10-15% hypothetical reduction in sales is their point, not the effect on corporate profits. Less consumer junk for the landfill is good.

Comment by Sharlin 3 days ago

Exactly.

Comment by Legend2440 4 days ago

>If products are 20% more expensive but this only results in 10-15% less sales, the corporation is still very happy, particularly due to the margin bit.

If they could have made more money by raising prices 20%, they would already have done so.

Sellers can set their prices to whatever they want, AI mode or not.

Comment by bilalq 4 days ago

AI mode doesn't even search. I'll ask it to find a blog post or article that I remember reading recently. It often just fails to find it. But when it does, it'll mention the title and say to just go to the link to it. But it never gives me the link. This is a literal response I got from AI mode (with titles swapped out):

> If you search the term "<POSSIBLE_ARTICLE_TITLE>" or "<POSSIBLE_ARTICLE_TITLE>" on Hacker News or Google, you will find the exact write-up and the massive threads of founders sharing matching horror stories.

Of course, there are no threads on HackerNews for that if you search it. My response was to just google for me, and it links me to a random novel that doesn't even match the titles suggested.

Comment by bethekidyouwant 4 days ago

Finding the cheapest price for a product that isn’t fake is a completely unsolved problem and the entire premise of this is ridiculous

Comment by throwitaway222 4 days ago

That's really weird - I was trying to give my wife prices for a salad the other day, and it was showing 18.99 on the summary I was reading aloud (she was driving).

When we got to the restaurant she pointed out the salads were all 14.99 not 18.99. WTH? I'm assuming AI is showing some doordash price instead. We were driving there to pick it up in person.

Comment by lennart-rth 4 days ago

I wonder when dynamic pricing based on the users chat history will be a thing. The users context based of LLM conversation should be way more detailed compared to traditional cookie tracking. Also buyers manipulation could be done at some point. Pretty scary to think about

Comment by autoexec 4 days ago

dynamic/discriminatory pricing will be based on your chat history, your search history, your location, your purchase history, and every and any other data point that can be leveraged against you. Buying something near the birthday of a loved one? Expect prices to go up. Haven't driven in two days when you usually would have and now you're looking for a car part? Expect your prices to go up. Got a new job where you make more money? Expect your prices to go up.

Comment by Legend2440 4 days ago

Keep in mind that there is still a downwards force on prices from competition.

More information does not necessarily help AutoZone raise prices because (1. everybody already knows that people who buy car parts are likely trying to fix their car and (2. other sellers will undercut them and they will miss out on sales.

Comment by autoexec 4 days ago

> everybody already knows that people who buy car parts are likely trying to fix their car

But people who only have one car can probably be forced to pay more than someone who is buying a part for a second car. Someone with more money in their bank account can afford to pay higher prices. More information might not always help them in every case, but it doesn't have to as long as it can help them enough of the time. Companies expect to make massive increases in profits by introducing discriminatory pricing.

Other sellers want to maximize the amount of money they can squeeze out of their customers too so they will use whatever information they have to set prices as high as they can get away with. Some places may not jump on discriminatory pricing as quickly, but consumers don't always shop around either and the companies making money hand over fist by jacking up their prices will be able to pay for more ads and better rankings in search results.

Comment by heavenlyblue 4 days ago

Let's get it to the next level: shopping for a present for your friend whose birthday is in 5 months? Still higher prices because they can use yiur early reminder to know you'll need that.

Comment by autoexec 4 days ago

Between android devices, gmail, and the data collected from everyone's browsing history Google has enough data to squeeze people hard. Other companies are trying to get in on the action too, the digital price tags and facial recognition systems are being rolled out in stores, but the data my grocery store can buy about me from data brokers is nothing compared to what google already has.

Comment by Legend2440 4 days ago

How exactly does this help them?

There is a lot of competition in the gift/trinket space. You could buy that birthday present from any number of sellers. If seller #183 jacks up prices, you will go buy from seller #765 instead.

Comment by autoexec 4 days ago

That's not how consumers work. The vast majority of the time they just buy whatever amazon shows them as the first result. They aren't comparison shopping at all. Even for consumers who do comparison shop it won't matter much when every major retailer, website, and grocery store is also setting personalized prices based on what they know about you.

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by podgorniy 4 days ago

this feels to be inevitable...

Comment by sandeepkd 4 days ago

Started with a theory that it might be a possibility where google as a Ad business is trying to make money for their AI expenses from consumer. However after verifying the results for the items mentioned in the article plus some more and I DO NOT see any discrepancy in prices with either mode.

Dont want to call it clickbait right away, though its possible that it might be there before and Google fixed it OR the Author did not perform an apple to apple comparison, meaning its hard to verify if its same location and machine for both types of searches

Comment by throw_m239339 4 days ago

It's crazy how getting the best deals online is still a unsolved problem. Google product page was garbage even before AI, most aggregators are a complete farce as well, either displaying deals that are out of date or completely unrelated items, and let's not even get started with price tracking...

You'd think of all the companies, Google would be the best one to come up with a good solution for deal hunting but no...

I guess it's in no company's interest for consumers to get the best deals...

Comment by anonreplier 4 days ago

For the UK, hotukdeals is pretty good

Comment by throw_m239339 4 days ago

That site exists in my country but under a different name (the UI is exactly the same so I imagine it's the same company). It's OK, but their search engine is mediocre. You look for Smartphone deals and they show you bananas... this is the very thing that shouldn't happen on a site like that. It means that whatever algorithm they use isn't very sophisticated.

Comment by KellyCriterion 4 days ago

I made pretty good experienes with some of these popular price watching websites in my region; for typical day to day stuff, they work great.

For special things, I look up the current pricing landscape anyway.

Comment by oblio 4 days ago

It's worse.

It's in Google's interest to auction ad spots at the highest price.

That's it.

Nothing else matters. The content needs to be vaguely legal, the quality or any other product feature doesn't matter.

Another platform, Facebook, makes about 10% of its income from scams. No manager or executive will willingly reduce their company's income by 10%.

Comment by NIKHILRAI7081 4 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by altcognito 4 days ago

> It's crazy how getting the best deals online is still a unsolved problem.

Not actually. Good deals are usually compensatation or a symptom of market forces. Additional costs in the form of marketing, advertising or risk aversion (bad or new vendors) are just some of the reasons that good deals exists.

Comment by hparadiz 4 days ago

I started to use TUIs to do this. Have them track "tracked" products in a local storage mechanism and otherwise browse the web as normal through a controlled browser. It's not optimal but it's the only way to have some control over what it's doing.

Comment by fsckboy 4 days ago

I wish that purchase/shopping search engines were entirely separate and removed from general search engines. "are you searching for information or are you shopping?"

when I'm searching for information, so often results are just flooded with pricing from sellers.

Comment by insane_dreamer 4 days ago

Not clear to me: is the product _actually_ 21.6% more expensive when searched for with AI, or is AI just incorrectly showing a more expensive price? In other words, are prices dynamically modified depending on whether the original query is search vs AI?

Comment by HarHarVeryFunny 4 days ago

So are companies paying more to have products featured in AI mode rather than just plain search?

It sucks that Google seem to be phasing out plain search - for some specialized searches it ONLY gives me AI mode results, which are useless, and I have to go to Bing instead.

Comment by Legend2440 4 days ago

>So are companies paying more to have products featured in AI mode rather than just plain search?

No - in fact, the results listed in the article are not paid ads.

You only can pay to be in the 'sponsored results' section at the bottom of the AI mode results.

Comment by add-sub-mul-div 4 days ago

It's clearly part of the AI endgame that conversational AI output will sell an undisclosed promoted slant where possible. The money will not be left on the table. Regulation effectively no longer exists.

Comment by psyclobe 2 days ago

Good most product search results are thr cheapest crap i always sort by price

Comment by Yhippa 4 days ago

My guess is that there are two different teams working on these.

Comment by tamimio 4 days ago

Or maybe the stores prices get adjusted (lower) based on few factors like being a human (not ai bot) and location and other factors?

Comment by theturtletalks 4 days ago

I’m building an agentic commerce platform where you can connect any model and the stores are served as MCP-UI components.

Comment by kanjinoguchi 4 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by vegnus 4 days ago

Yesterday I searched: Is ChatGPT down? Google: No, it is not down. I clicked on their status page. It was down.

Comment by jeffbee 4 days ago

I dislike when unjustifiable precision in a headline is used to try to give some credibility to a defective analysis.

Comment by AlexandrB 4 days ago

I would never use AI for shopping. The incentives to mess with the results for commercial gain are too great.

Comment by shadowgovt 4 days ago

That is interesting.

The next question I'd ask is what the quality / reliability signal looks like. It is entirely possible that the results differ, but the organic search results are SEO'd garbage that lead to knock-offs, fell-off-the-trucks, or refurbs-sold-as-new.

But nonetheless, the fact they differ at all is an intriguing result.

Comment by orbital-decay 4 days ago

Worth keeping in mind that the article is written by a competitor.

Comment by jeffgreco 4 days ago

I've also had issues with severely out of date product results.

Comment by mococa 4 days ago

For me (brazilian reais) it always cut the price two digits

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by josefritzishere 4 days ago

Ai costs me money and it provides higher prices? That's lose/lose.

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by zarmin 4 days ago

Am I the only one who's noticed "AI Mode" is dario's last name? A(mode)I?

Thank you for your time this evening.

Comment by Oarch 4 days ago

Excellent work as always, Kojima

Comment by jarek83 4 days ago

So we're getting AInflation

Comment by 4 days ago

Comment by seanhunter 3 days ago

Welcome to the future. It’s slightly worse than you expected.

Comment by apoorvkhanna88 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by ddm4rketer 4 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by Finance-broski 4 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by LePetitPrince 4 days ago

[dead]

Comment by shevy-java 4 days ago

So Google is now a scammer - it scams elderly people for 21.6% higher cost, for the same product. Now we know how AI makes more revenue: it leeches off of people who don't know they are being scammed.

The solution is really easy (aside from having a government in the USA that stops milking the people - right now the orange clown is pocketing away money into his cronies, including Google and the other leeching US mega-corporations): Stop relying on Google. From A to Z.

I am aware that de-googling is very hard; I myself haven't yet completed that, but I also decided that eventually I will ban all of Google's impressive Evilness. Whenever an alternative exists that works at the least as well, I will use it.