Google Says AI Overviews Drive Shopping, Some Marketers Aren’t Sold

Google says its AI-powered search has accelerated shopping behaviours — as boundaries blur between online activities — but marketers on the ground have offered a contradictory viewpoint.

Dan Taylor, Google Ads global vice president, held a media roundtable yesterday where he presented a vision of search, advertising and shopping unified within the Google ecosystem.

“Google is an AI-first company ,” he said, noting that analytical and predictive artificial intelligence has been used in its search and Google Ads offering for a decade, “operating quietly in the background”.

Now, AI is the cool kid.

“New generative AI capabilities are centre, and they’ve captured the industry’s imagination because it’s tangible. It’s something you can see, and it’s helping take consumer experiences and advertising to the next level.”

An AI overview about AI overviews (Mumbrella)

AI has upended Google’s search function, and in doing so, it has changed consumer behaviour.

“Taking a photo with your phone can now be searching,” he notes, of Google Lens, a photo-based search function on Android phones.

“Scrolling can now happen on your television in your living room with your remote control. And if you pause a creator video to circle something in the background, would you call that streaming, scrolling, searching, or shopping? It’s all of them at once.”

Google receives more than 5 trillion search queries on Google each year, with 20 billion visual search queries every month.

Google’s AI overviews, in which a summary of a search query is generated by AI, has significantly changed the way people use Google search, Taylor said.

“To me, that is what makes bringing AI into search so exciting,” Taylor says, “because it’s opening up new ways for people to search, including the types of questions they can ask, and of course, the answers that Google can give them.

“They’re becoming increasingly more complex and conversational. AI overviews help provide answers to these more complex questions, like you would in a normal conversation. ”

Taylor speaking to APAC media

Taylor claims that “people who use AI overviews search more, they’re more satisfied with the results they see, and they are visiting a greater diversity of websites.

“We also know that people who are engaging with AI overviews are finding the ads helpful, because they can quickly connect with relevant businesses, products, and services to take the next step at the exact moment they need them.

“In fact,” he said, “with the launch of AI overviews, we’ve seen the volume of commercial queries increase.”

This should be music to marketers ears, especially the statistic that 25% of all Google Lens searches have “commercial intent.”

In an interview with Mumbrella — about Google’s possible loss of the Chrome browser — Paul Hewett, CEO of In Marketing We Trust, offered a different view of the changing search environment.

“We’re already starting to see users start to move away, to doing most of their searching or a good proportion of their searching through ChatGPT,” Hewett said. He believes total search behaviour is up, but that Google now has a smaller fragment of it.

“We’re seeing a drop in the actual engagement with adverts as well,” Hewett says of Google Ads. “Click-through rates has been reported to be dropping across the board. There are a few studies out there looking at the engagement rate with search ads.

“They report slightly different figures and they’ve got different methodologies, but one of the things that’s been reported consistently is a decrease in the click through rate. And, this is just isn’t our data. This is third-party research.”

Hewett said engagement rates with Google Ads have dropped 15-25%, depending on the study.

“And that is largely put down to the inclusion of AI overviews into commercial searches. This is really significant for advertisers. A 15-25% [drop in] click-through rate is is challenging, particularly in the current economic climate.”

Source : Mumbrella