If you’ve been trusting Google’s AI Mode to check prices while you shop, it’s worth pausing before you buy. A study from Product Rise looked at products that showed up in both AI Mode and standard Google Search results, and found a clear gap.
On average, the price AI Mode displayed ran 21.6% higher than what regular search showed for the exact same item.
That’s not a small rounding error. It means the AI-generated shopping summary you’re relying on to save time could be steering you toward a worse deal, without you ever knowing it.
Google AI Mode Shopping Price Study
The team behind the study didn’t stop at one comparison. They ran identical shopping queries through both search versions at the same time, checking results across the US and UK markets. And it turns out that 21.6% figure was just the surface of the problem.
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Once you widen the lens and look at every product each version returned, not only the ones that matched up, the gap gets much bigger.
AI Mode’s typical price came in around 49% higher than regular search. In dollar terms, that’s a median price of $149 versus $100. On top of that, prices simply didn’t line up at all for 38% of the products tracked. And when they didn’t match, AI Mode was the pricier option roughly two out of every three times.
Here’s what makes this even stranger. Only 1.28% of the products showing up in regular search also appeared in AI Mode for that same query.
In other words, you’re rarely looking at the same set of items twice. The seller behind the top result changed nearly half the time as well. That pattern suggests AI Mode isn’t just rearranging the same pool of offers in a different order. It’s actively surfacing a different set of products altogether.
Google’s reaction to Google AI Mode shopping price running higher
Google didn’t stay quiet when Futurism asked for a response to this study. The company pushed back, saying it hasn’t confirmed the study’s numbers are accurate, and pointed out that every shopping result on Google, whether it comes from AI Mode or the regular results page, draws from the same Shopping Graph database in the backend.
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A Google spokesperson put it this way: shoppers can click into any product listing and compare prices across retailers themselves, then pick whichever option works best for them.
Fair enough, technically. But that answer hands the job back to you. Plenty of people assume the first price they see is already the good one, especially when the whole selling point of AI Mode is that it does the comparing for you.
So if you still have to open every listing and check prices yourself anyway, it’s worth asking what exactly AI Mode is saving you. And why it’s being marketed as the easier, smarter way to shop when it might be doing the opposite.
