AI and Google Search in ecommerce – what is going on?

If you’re selling online in 2025, chances are you’ve heard a lot of buzz and noise about AI and Google search and how is AI changing how people shop. Customers are searching, exploring with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. With this big shift from zero AI to using it in our everyday lives, it was just a matter of time before it would become a part of ecommerce, too.

But, there’s no need to worry because here’s the twist: Google still sits at the heart of ecommerce SEO.

Why? Because Google owns the data and that won’t change any time soon. More than 35 billion product listings live in Google Shopping Graph, which quietly makes it one of the biggest product databases on the internet. And that matters more than ever. 

To help break it down, we had a conversation with Mihailo, founder of the ecommerce SEO agency Elvion, who’s been working with online merchants across Europe and the US.

Search is changing, but Google still dominates

AI is changing how people search. More users start their shopping journeys with tools like ChatGPT to ask open-ended questions, do research, or compare products across marketplaces. It has shown as a really useful tool for product research, so it’s expected that you can soon finish a purchase through the tool itself.

But these AI tools often pull product data directly from Google’s index. That means Google’s product ecosystem isn’t getting replaced, but it’s more like becoming the underlying engine for product discovery.

Even the way search results look has changed. 

Google search results are now looking more like category pages than traditional lists of 10 blue links. Shopping ads, product carousels, and visual filters dominate the results. Of course, this makes the competition fiercer, but that also means there’s always room for improvement – if you try to keep up.

And that shift means ecommerce brands need to treat their SEO strategy the same way they’d approach their marketplace listings.

Your product feed should be your no.1 mission

If you want your products to be found in Google, your product feed needs to be clean, accurate, and detailed. Customers expect that they can find all the information they need to decide to buy.

Yet, according to experts, more than 60% of ecommerce merchants either don’t have a product feed submitted to Google Merchant Center or have one that’s broken, outdated, or incomplete.

Common problems include:

• Missing feeds entirely
• Feeds that don’t reflect product availability
• Poor or missing category tags and attributes

When your product feed is correctly optimized:

• Google can display your products in shopping results
• You appear in free product listings, not just ads
• You get better product match accuracy in AI-generated searches

And it’s not just about getting the feed ready once – it needs to stay up to date in real time to reflect price, stock, variants, and more.

Also, make sure your store is syncing your feed via Shopify, WooCommerce, or your PIM (Product Information Management) system to Google Merchant Center, and review the diagnostics regularly.

Product schema works wonders

Schema markup helps Google understand your product pages. It’s what makes rich results possible. For example, things like review stars, price info, stock status, etc. Without product schema, Google may not even realize your page is selling something. When Google crawls your website, it sees raw code and tries to interpret the content. Product schema markup is like adding signposts. It tells Google:

“Hey, this is a product. This is the price. This is the stock status. Here’s a review.”

With it, you increase the chance of:

• Showing up in shopping carousels
• Being pulled into AI answers
• Receiving improved listings in search results

Focus on adding proper product, offer, and review schema on all product pages. Most modern ecommerce platforms allow this with apps or plugins, but it’s worth having a developer review your implementation to make sure it’s valid.

Visibility data from multiple sources

When it comes to ecommerce SEO, most store owners look at Google Search Console and call it a day. But in 2025, that’s not enough. If you’re serious about understanding how your products perform in Google, both in organic search and across the Shopping experience,  you need to go a bit deeper than that.

One of the challenges with ecommerce SEO today is that your visibility data is scattered:

• Google Search Console shows organic search queries
• Google Merchant Center shows shopping ad performance
• Google Analytics tracks channel performance but often lacks clarity between organic and paid product listings

So you need to build a unified view. That means pulling these data sources together and mapping them against your product performance:

• What products are showing up?
• What’s getting clicks vs. impressions?
• Which categories are driving revenue?

For example, Mihailo mentioned that many of their clients are surprised to discover top-performing revenue drivers aren’t necessarily their most visible products. Sometimes, bestsellers aren’t being featured enough in Shopping results due to feed errors or missing schema. Sometimes, seasonal items have traffic spikes that aren’t being captured due to poor tagging. And if you can track this, you can act on it. Most sellers don’t, and that’s exactly your opportunity.

Own your niche and taxonomy

This is a big one. Google doesn’t just look at individual product pages. It looks at your entire site architecture to decide if you’re a relevant, trustworthy source for a product category. This is where owning your niche and structuring your site accordingly becomes your advantage. Google increasingly rewards category depth and niche authority. If you’re a generalist store with a bunch of unrelated products, you’ll find it more difficult to differentiate.

To fully capitalize on that:

• Build out your product taxonomy in a way that matches how users search (brand + category + gender + color)
• Don’t just rely on filters, create dedicated category and subcategory pages

Treat each collection page as a potential landing page

In most ecommerce stores, collection pages are treated like a utility, a way to group similar products and help users navigate. But in reality, each collection page is a powerful SEO and marketing asset. 

For example, instead of one “Shoes” page, create pages like:

• Men’s Trail Running Shoes
• Women’s Waterproof Hiking Boots
• Black Trail Shoes by Salomon

When built correctly, those pages improve user experience and also help Google understand your site’s relevance in that niche. Over time, that builds what SEOs call topical authority, in other words, the credibility to rank not just for one term, but for dozens or hundreds in a category cluster.

Content strategy supports transactions

When people think of “content strategy,” they often picture blog posts collecting dust in a corner of the website. But in ecommerce, especially in SEO, content has a very clear job: to drive conversions. It’s not about how often you publish. Focus on creating useful content that directly supports the user’s buying decision and reinforces your authority in your niche.

High-growth ecommerce brands don’t treat content as an afterthought. They build content into the shopping journey, from discovery to decision-making, across multiple channels.

And here’s what you can do:

• Write buying guides that link to product collections
• Create comparison pages for top-selling products
• Build FAQ hubs that answer real search queries

Your content lives across:

• Product descriptions
• Category headers
• Email flows
• On-site chat scripts

Every touchpoint helps you signal relevance and build trust.

Don’t ignore crawling and bot behavior

Let’s say your store has 500 products. Google’s bots can crawl and index your entire site pretty easily. But once you pass 10,000 SKUs (or generate hundreds of filter-based category pages), you’re no longer in safe territory. If your store has over 10,000 products, Google won’t automatically crawl every page regularly. 

Crawl budget is basically the number of pages Google is willing to crawl on your site within a certain timeframe. It’s not infinite. And if Google wastes time on low-value or duplicate pages, your important ones, like new product launches or seasonal collections, might get missed or delayed in indexing.

This is especially common with:

• Stores that auto-generate a lot of filter pages (colour + size + brand + gender variations)
• Sites with poor internal linking structure
• Massive catalogs that change frequently

You need to:

• Optimize internal linking so your key pages are prioritized
• Submit updated sitemaps for products and categories
• Use log file analysis to understand how Googlebot is interacting with your site

That way, you can focus your technical SEO on areas that impact discovery the most.

AI and Google search = AI discovery, Google commerce

AI and Google search – well, things are changing a lot and fast. But Google isn’t going anywhere, and in ecommerce, it’s becoming more central, not less so you need to figure out how to work with Google’s systems, not against them.

And if you’re an ecommerce brand serious about growth, Mihailo’s advice is clear: get your feed in order, own your niche, structure your site, and measure everything.

If you want help implementing any of this, especially fixing your feed and optimising your categories, get in touch. We can walk you through the setup or do the work for you!