Google's AI Mode surfaced roughly 95 percent fewer product listings than standard search on identical shopping queries tracked over three weeks in July 2026, according to a data study published today by Productrise, a platform that monitors organic product visibility in Google Shopping.

The study compared standard Google search against AI Mode on more than 100,000 identical shopping searches, tracking over two million product listings side by side on the same day for each query. Standard search returned at least one product on about 88 percent of shopping queries, while AI Mode did so on only about 23 percent, according to Productrise. When products did appear on both surfaces, standard search displayed an average of 22.5 listings per results page compared with 4.3 in AI Mode, a gap the company describes as roughly 5.3 times fewer competitive slots. Combined, the two effects produced what Productrise calls a 95 percent collapse in overall product visibility across the same query set.

Perhaps the most striking secondary finding concerns overlap. Only about 0.8 percent of products visible in standard search also appeared in AI Mode for the same query on the same day, according to the study, indicating that the two surfaces draw on largely different subsets of the same underlying catalog rather than simply showing a trimmed version of the same results.

What the study measured

Productrise ran the analysis over 21 days in July 2026, comparing the same product-centric queries on standard Google search and AI Mode on the same day, using clean, non-personalized sessions, according to the company. The tracking covered the United States and the United Kingdom exclusively, markets where Google's Shopping Graph feeds AI Mode answers directly, according to Productrise. The company noted that many other markets do not yet return rich product results inside AI Mode, which is why those markets were excluded from the sample.

The methodology relied on keyword queries entered directly, rather than the longer conversational prompts sometimes associated with AI-first search behavior. Productrise said this approach mirrors how most people currently reach AI Mode, since the surface opens from the standard search box rather than a separate interface, meaning searchers arrive with ordinary shopping keywords.

A "product," in Productrise's definition, means one distinct listing: a single card inside a standard Shopping carousel, or a single product referenced inside an AI Mode answer. Averages excluded empty results, and to match products across the two surfaces the company normalized product titles, since AI Mode displays Google's cleaned names while standard search shows raw feed titles supplied by merchants.

Three findings, one combined effect

The study breaks its data into three sequential findings. The first concerns whether a shopping search returns any products at all. Standard search cleared that bar on about 88 percent of tracked queries; AI Mode cleared it on roughly 23 percent, according to the data. Productrise illustrated the gap with a side-by-side example for the query "neck cream," in which standard search filled the results page with a shoppable product carousel, while AI Mode answered the identical search with a block of text linking to third-party reviews and contained no shoppable product listing at all.

The second finding addresses volume once products do appear. Standard search showed an average of 22.5 products per results page among queries that returned any, while AI Mode showed an average of 4.3, according to the study. Productrise used the query "1/2 inch plywood" to demonstrate this gap, noting that standard search returned a single carousel of ten products for that search, while AI Mode narrowed the same query to four listed products total.

The third finding combines the first two effects. Multiplying the reduced frequency of product appearances by the reduced count when they do appear produces the headline figure: approximately 95 percent fewer product listings surfaced in AI Mode than in standard search across the same set of queries, according to Productrise's calculations.

Industry commentary included in the release

Productrise included commentary from three named search professionals alongside its data. Jason Berkowitz, founder of Break The Web, said the brands that invest in aligning and optimizing their product data will maintain an advantage. "The brands taking the initiative to accurately align and optimize their product data are going to stay three steps ahead," Berkowitz said. He raised a question about whether AI Mode's current product scarcity is a lasting characteristic of the surface or a temporary phase tied to Google's expanding monetization plans. "Google is already testing sponsored product experiences in AI Mode, but as those placements become more prominent, will it also expand the opportunities for organic product listings?" Berkowitz said, adding that such a shift could make AI Mode resemble "a visual evolution of traditional search, with a familiar balance of paid and organic results."

Callum Lockwood, SEO director at Re:Signal, cautioned against reading the reduced product count as a simple loss of opportunity for brands. "AI search fundamentally changes the way people discover products, and those journeys are often conversational rather than a single query," Lockwood said. "Fewer products per response doesn't necessarily mean fewer opportunities for brands to be recommended over the course of an entire shopping journey." He argued that product data, brand signals, and broader organic visibility can no longer be treated as separate disciplines. "AI systems need confidence in both the product and the brand before recommending them, so success comes from strengthening the entire ecosystem rather than optimising individual channels in isolation," Lockwood said.

Jamie D'Alessandro, SEO manager at Jakala, framed the narrower result set as consistent with Google's broader product philosophy rather than a departure from it. "Starkly fewer products, but a much narrower focus reinforces Google's commitment to helping people find what they need quicker," D'Alessandro said, describing the shift as Google "repackaging product information in a way that's easier to deliver to the user." D'Alessandro added that optimized product data has moved beyond a baseline requirement. "A card with a picture and a price isn't enough to entice anyone anymore," D'Alessandro said, suggesting that if Google increasingly uses reviews and other signals to subcategorize products, brands need to evaluate whether their own products merit inclusion at all.

Hugo Huijer, founder of Productrise, offered a possible explanation for why AI Mode returns shorter product lists, tying it to the conversational nature of the interface. "My best guess for why the product lists are so short is that AI search simply behaves differently," Huijer said. "It's conversational, and if Google expects you to ask a follow-up anyway, whether that's cheaper products, a different brand, or faster shipping, it doesn't need to show twenty products upfront." Huijer suggested that appearing among four or five recommended products carries different value than appearing among twenty. "Click-through rates from these AI Mode sessions should be considerably higher for the products that do make the cut," Huijer said, adding that reports of stronger conversion from AI-driven traffic suggest that "while the visibility pie is shrinking, each slice is likely worth more."

Context: AI Mode's rapid build-out

The Productrise findings arrive roughly fourteen months after AI Mode's initial United States launch in May 2025. In that period, the surface has expanded from a standalone experiment into infrastructure embedded across Google's core products. AI Mode surpassed one billion monthly active users globally by May 2026, with query volumes more than doubling every quarter since launch, according to a data report Google published on May 19, 2026, as PPC Land reported. That same report found average query length in AI Mode running roughly three times longer than in traditional search.

Commercial infrastructure has followed the user growth closely. Google formally introduced a shopping ad format built for AI Mode on February 11, 2026, when the surface already counted more than 75 million daily active users, as PPC Land reported at the time. Sponsored store listings were subsequently observed inside AI Mode product panels by outside analysts in March 2026, and PPC Land documented how that placement fit a pattern of monetization spreading across the surface. By late May 2026, PPC Land reported that sponsored listings inside AI Mode had become visually difficult to distinguish from organic recommendations, separated only by a small "Sponsored" label.

Google has simultaneously expanded the structured data fields that merchants can use to try to secure organic visibility on the surface. On January 11, 2026, the company announced dozens of new Merchant Center attributes designed specifically for conversational commerce interfaces including AI Mode, Gemini, and Business Agent, as PPC Land reported. Several of those fields, according to Google's own Merchant Center help documentation cited in later PPC Land coverage, carry an explicit note stating they are "primarily intended for use in conversational experiences such as AI Mode in Google Search." At Google Marketing Live on May 20, 2026, the company introduced conversational attributes as a distinct Merchant Center data type, according to PPC Land's coverage of that event, alongside new AI-powered Shopping ad formats intended for higher-consideration purchases.

The underlying data source for both organic and paid placements is Google's Shopping Graph, which the company has said contains more than 60 billion product listings, with over 2 billion receiving updates every hour, according to PPC Land's reporting on a Merchant Center reporting tool Google introduced in June 2026 specifically to help brands track their performance inside AI Mode.

A pattern of shrinking product counts within a growing surface

The Productrise findings are not the first PPC Land has covered concerning Walmart's presence inside Google's organic Shopping carousels. On March 26, 2026, Productrise published a separate study, reported by PPC Land, finding that Walmart operated more than 1,600 distinct seller names within standard Google Shopping carousels, each resolving back to Walmart.com but counted separately by Google's carousel diversity algorithm. That earlier analysis, based on more than one million product listings across over 50,000 results pages, examined a different mechanic within the same organic Shopping ecosystem that the new AI Mode study now measures.

The new findings also sit within a broader body of research PPC Land has tracked concerning how Google's AI-generated answers affect the volume of information, paid and organic, that reaches users compared with traditional search formats. Ahrefs research published April 17, 2025, found that AI Overviews reduced organic clicks to top-ranking websites by 34.5 percent, based on an analysis of 300,000 keywords, according to PPC Land's coverage of that research. A follow-up Ahrefs study published February 4, 2026, found the reduction had grown to 58 percent for top-ranking pages, according to PPC Land, suggesting the effect intensified as AI Overviews expanded in coverage. A randomized field experiment involving 1,065 desktop Chrome users, the first causal study of its kind on the topic, found that AI Overviews cut outbound organic clicks by 39.8 percent and raised zero-click searches by 34.5 percent when the feature appeared, with no measurable improvement in how users rated their search experience, according to PPC Land's reporting on that study.

Google has consistently defended its AI search features against this body of research. The company has said its AI features send substantial traffic to websites and that clicks originating from AI-generated summaries demonstrate higher engagement quality, according to statements PPC Land has documented from company representatives, including references to AI Overview reaching 1.5 billion monthly users as of mid-2025. Google has not, at the time of this article's publication, issued a public response specifically addressing the Productrise Shopping visibility figures.

Why the finding matters for the marketing community

The Productrise data lands at a moment when the underlying premise, that AI Mode represents a growing share of how consumers search, is well established by Google's own disclosures. With AI Mode's user base surpassing one billion monthly actives and continuing to compound quarter over quarter, a structural change in how the surface displays commercial results carries consequences that scale with adoption rather than remaining a marginal concern. If AI Mode's current product-display behavior persists as the surface becomes more central to search, the organic Shopping visibility that retailers have built through years of feed optimization and product data management may not transfer at the same scale.

The near-total lack of overlap between products shown on standard search and products shown in AI Mode, just 0.8 percent according to Productrise, raises a separate question beyond raw volume: retailers who rank well in conventional Shopping carousels have no guarantee their products will appear at all when the identical query runs through AI Mode. That distinction matters because Google's own Shopping Graph, the same underlying data source described in PPC Land's coverage of Google's newer Merchant Center reporting tools, feeds both surfaces. A single data source producing almost entirely different result sets suggests Google's ranking or selection logic, not merely feed availability, determines which products clear the bar for inclusion in a conversational answer.

The commentary Productrise gathered alongside its data reflects a divided but not contradictory reading of what the shift means commercially. Berkowitz and Lockwood both point toward increased competitive pressure for brands to invest in both paid placement and organic product data quality simultaneously, rather than treating the two as separable strategies. Huijer's explanation for the shorter product lists, that AI Mode's conversational structure defers additional options to follow-up exchanges rather than surfacing them all at once, aligns with data Google itself has published regarding the surface, since PPC Land has reported that follow-up queries in AI Mode have been growing more than 40 percent per month on average as of the company's most recent public disclosures. Whether that conversational depth compensates commercially for the reduction in single-response visibility, in terms of conversion rates or overall reach across a full shopping journey, remains an open question that neither the Productrise data nor Google's public statements currently resolve with comparable rigor.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Productrise, a platform that tracks organic product visibility in Google Shopping, conducted the study. Commentary was contributed by Jason Berkowitz of Break The Web, Callum Lockwood of Re:Signal, Jamie D'Alessandro of Jakala, and Hugo Huijer, founder of Productrise.

What: Standard Google search returned products on about 88 percent of shopping queries, compared with about 23 percent for AI Mode. When products did appear, standard search showed an average of 22.5 listings per page versus 4.3 for AI Mode. Combined, AI Mode surfaced approximately 95 percent fewer product listings than standard search across the same query set, with only about 0.8 percent of products overlapping between the two surfaces.

When: The tracking ran over 21 days in July 2026, and Productrise published the findings today, July 29, 2026.

Where: The study covered the United States and the United Kingdom, the two markets where Google's Shopping Graph feeds directly into AI Mode responses.

Why: The findings quantify, for the first time at this scale, how a specific commercial category, shoppable product listings, is displayed differently between Google's traditional search results and its AI Mode interface, a surface that has surpassed one billion monthly active users and continues to expand its advertising infrastructure.