Google Brings Conversational Search and Agentic Checkout to Shopping — Reducing Friction for Buyers and Raising the Stakes for Retailers

Google announced Gemini powered shopping features including conversational search, virtual try on, agentic checkout that can monitor prices and buy, and an AI that calls stores to confirm local inventory. Merchants must improve product data, real time inventory and Google Merchant integration to keep visibility and conversions.

Google Brings Conversational Search and Agentic Checkout to Shopping — Reducing Friction for Buyers and Raising the Stakes for Retailers

On November 13, 2025, Google introduced a suite of Gemini powered shopping features that aim to let people find, compare and buy products with far less manual effort. The rollout centers on conversational search, virtual try on and richer discovery, an agentic checkout that can monitor prices and complete purchases, and an AI that calls local stores to check inventory. These features reduce friction for buyers while increasing the operational demands on merchants and retailers.

Background why Google is reworking shopping with AI

Traditional ecommerce search forces shoppers to translate intent into keywords, click through product pages and repeat steps across sites. Google embeds large multimodal models into core shopping flows to change that. The goal is to make product exploration feel like a natural conversation and to automate transactional steps that are repetitive or time sensitive, such as price tracking, availability confirmation and checkout. For merchants and small businesses that rely on discovery, this is a clear signal: clean product feeds and integration with Google Merchant tools determine whether an AI surfaces your products.

Key features at a glance

  • Conversational search that accepts natural language queries and maintains context across follow up questions so it behaves like a shopping assistant.
  • Virtual try on and richer discovery with visual preview, 3D images and AR experiences that reduce uncertainty and cart abandonment.
  • Agentic checkout that can monitor prices, recommend the best time to buy and complete purchases using linked payment options like Google Pay.
  • AI that calls stores to verify local inventory and answer questions not captured in feeds, improving local availability signals.

Why this matters to shoppers and businesses

These updates compress discovery and transaction into fewer interactions, benefiting shoppers who value speed and convenience. From an ecommerce SEO perspective, Google is prioritizing complete product data in the Google Shopping Graph over simple keyword matching. That means merchants who optimize for transactional keywords and long tail keywords and who supply rich structured data, accurate pricing and real time inventory are more likely to be recommended by AI driven agents.

Practical steps for merchants

  • Improve product data accuracy in Google Merchant and product feeds. Ensure titles, descriptions and attributes match buyer intent and include semantic keywords that reflect how customers ask questions.
  • Use structured data and rich media including detailed schema markup, high quality images, 3D content and videos so the AI can evaluate products beyond plain text.
  • Enable real time inventory and fast fulfillment so agentic checkout and store calling features return reliable availability signals that increase conversion rate.
  • Collect first party data to support personalization and to retain control over customer relationships as AI driven channels evolve.
  • Consider automation services or agency help to integrate feeds, automate updates and monitor price performance for AI shopping agents.

Implications and analysis

Google is accelerating a trend where search becomes transactional and platforms act as intermediaries that can complete purchases. Visibility is becoming conditional on integration and data hygiene. Sellers with optimized listings and reliable fulfillment will likely see higher conversion rates, while those with stale feeds or slow operations may lose visibility. Demand for third party services that automate feed management, price monitoring and fulfillment integration will grow as merchants adapt to new ecommerce SEO realities.

Conclusion

Google's Gemini powered shopping features make discovery and purchase more conversational and automated, reducing friction for buyers and raising the operational bar for merchants. The winners will be those who prioritize product data accuracy, rich media and seamless integration with Google Merchant and payment tools. For everyone else, this update is a practical prompt to upgrade ecommerce systems and processes so AI shopping agents can find and trust your products.

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