On September 2, 2026, Productrise published data from tracking over 2 million product listings across 100,000-plus search results between August 9 and August 31. The finding that should make every WooCommerce store owner sit up: only 1.28 percent of products appearing in Google's Popular Products carousel also showed up in AI Mode for the same search query on the same day. When a product did appear in both, the first-listed seller was different 49.6 percent of the time. And when the price differed, AI Mode displayed the higher price 68.4 percent of the time.

Read that again. Same product. Same search. Same day. Different seller. Higher price. Nearly seven times out of ten.

What AI Mode actually is

If you have not used it yet, AI Mode is Google's conversational search experience. It sits one click away from any product search — a tab above the results, a button in Chrome's address bar, an option in the search box. You type the same query you would normally type, and instead of the familiar list of blue links and product carousels, you get an AI-generated answer with embedded product listings.

The Popular Products carousel, by contrast, is the grid of product cards that appears in regular Google search results. It pulls from Google's Shopping Graph, the same database that powers Merchant Center. For years, getting into that carousel has been a core goal for anyone running a WooCommerce store. Your product feed, your structured data, your pricing strategy — all of it was optimized around showing up in that grid.

AI Mode uses the same Shopping Graph. Google confirmed this to Futurism on the same day the Productrise data dropped. But "same data source" does not mean "same results." The AI is making different choices about which products to show, which sellers to highlight, and what prices to display.

The numbers that matter

The Productrise dataset covers US and UK product-focused queries. The company ran identical searches in both AI Mode and regular search on the same day, then compared results using Google's product ID.

The carousel showed an average of 27.8 products per query. AI Mode showed 3.9. That is a 7x reduction in visible products. If your store was product number 15 in the carousel, you were still visible. In AI Mode, only the top four make the cut.

Among the small subset of products that appeared in both, prices were different 38.1 percent of the time. When they differed, AI Mode's price was higher in 68.4 percent of cases. The median price difference when AI Mode was higher was 22.2 percent. Across all matched products — including the ones where prices were the same — AI Mode prices averaged 21.6 percent higher than carousel prices.

Google's response was measured. They told Futurism they have not verified the accuracy of Productrise's claims, and noted that shoppers can click into any product listing to compare prices across retailers. That is true. But the first price a shopper sees shapes their expectation. If AI Mode shows your product at a price 22 percent higher than what you actually charge, the shopper may never click through to discover the real number.

Why this happens

Nobody outside Google knows exactly how AI Mode selects products and sellers. Productrise founder Hugo Huijer suggested that the cheapest price is less of a factor in AI Mode than in the carousel. The data supports that interpretation, but it is still an interpretation, not a confirmed mechanism.

What we can observe is that AI Mode is doing something different from the carousel. It is selecting fewer products, choosing different sellers for the same items, and displaying different prices. Whether that is because the AI weighs product data differently, because it optimizes for conversation context rather than price competitiveness, or because of some other factor entirely, the practical result is the same: your position in the carousel does not guarantee your position in AI Mode.

What this means for WooCommerce stores

If you run a WooCommerce store and you have been optimizing for Google Shopping, you now have two surfaces to think about instead of one. The carousel is not going away, but AI Mode is one click from every product search and it is growing. Google is pushing it hard — it appears in the search box, in Chrome, and as a tab above results.

The first thing to do is check your own products. Search for your top items in regular search and then in AI Mode. Compare who appears first and at what price. If AI Mode is showing a different seller for your product, or showing a price that does not match what you charge, that is a problem you need to understand.

The second thing is to look at your Merchant Center data. Google's AI performance insights report, which launched earlier this year, shows your share of voice in AI Mode and AI Overviews as a percentage of AI impressions. It does not show seller or price metrics, so it will not tell you exactly what AI Mode is displaying. But it will tell you whether your products are showing up at all.

The third thing is to stop assuming that winning the carousel means winning Google Shopping. The 1.28 percent overlap number is the headline here. Almost nothing that shows up in the carousel shows up in AI Mode. The two systems are making independent decisions from the same data.

The uncomfortable truth

Google says both surfaces use the same Shopping Graph. The data says they produce wildly different results. That gap is either a feature or a bug, and Google has not said which. What they have said is that shoppers can click through to compare prices. That is technically true and practically irrelevant. Most people do not click through. They see a price, they make a judgment, they move on.

If AI Mode becomes the default way people search for products — and Google is clearly pushing in that direction — then the rules of visibility are changing. Price competitiveness may matter less. Feed optimization may matter differently. The seller who wins the carousel may not win the AI.

For WooCommerce store owners, the immediate action is simple: search for your products in both places and see what happens. The longer-term question is harder: how do you optimize for a system that selects 3.9 products out of 27.8 and shows a different price nearly 40 percent of the time?

Nobody has that answer yet. But the stores that start asking the question now will be ahead of the ones who find out the hard way.

Sources: Productrise — Google AI Mode Prefers More Expensive Products · Search Engine Journal — Google AI Mode Prices Differ From Product Carousel · Futurism — Google AI Mode Higher Prices Study