Create a Google Merchant Centre feed for free to get your products cited by Gemini’s shopping mode and learn what you can about what converts for your business before Google starts charging businesses to be featured by the service.

Last November I had a play with ChatGPT’s Shopping Assistant and reported back on how I found it.

Well, not surprisingly, a few weeks later Google launched their version – as they didn’t want to be left behind in the online shopping wars. As let’s face it, they’ve been doing rather well at that game for a long time.

In my test with Google, having had my hair radically chopped yesterday, I searched for “curl enhancing cream for wavy hair”, as that’s what my hairdresser told me to get. My initial results (as I don’t have AI mode on by default) looked like this – which is how we’re used to seeing products in Google:

However, if I switch to the “AI Mode” tab, I get this:

Tha AI tab gave me 5 suggestions, whereas the normal results gave me more suggestions than I could count (I did start to count, got to 20 in the top carousel, realised it was going to keep going, and scrolled down the page to just see loads and loads more there too).

This means, if you want your products to get found in AI search, you need to be in the top 5 recommendations. And the good news is, you can currently do this for free.

SUMMARY

Set up a free Google Merchant Centre feed of your products and ensure they’re written using the language people search with (more chatty than just keywords). Get as many good reviews as possible, ensure nothing goes out of stock, and keep your data as clean as possible – ideally with structured data. Ensure your visitors’ user experience is clear, and offer Google Pay as a payment option.

Google Merchant Centre Feed

If you sell online, make sure you’ve got a Google Merchant Centre feed – you can set it up for free. And the reason you need to get on this NOW is because right now, Google’s AI Mode is pulling from all the feeds on Google Merchant Centre – even the free ones.

Google are playing catch up to OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT) so the easiest way for them to launch and test an AI shopping mode is to feature products for free. If they charged people to be seen in this set of search results, they’d have to make sure it was really really bug free and perfect – and how can they launch that from the get-go? So experts are suggesting it’s free at the moment, whilst they iron out the kinks, and then in the long run they’ll charge you to be featured in it.

But you can take advantage of this free stage, not just to sell sell sell for free whilst you can, but to find out what works for you. Yes, Google will be tweaking and refining right now – well, for evermore because nothing online stays still. But you can still use this time to try different product listing descriptions, note which products get featured the most, examine what the traffic that comes from AI shopping mode does on your site, and overall, see how much money it makes you. Then you’ll know if it’s worth paying Google for ads once that becomes an option.

When I say try different product descriptions, I mean make sure they’re written for the way people ask questions. AI mode is taking a lot more than just key words into consideration. I could have expanded on my search to say “best curl enhancing cream for woman in her early 40s living in the UK”. Suddenly AI thinks about hormonal change, and humidity in the UK in January.

Are you technically ready?

Whilst you can rewrite your product descriptions and set up your feed (which is basically a CSV file you can make in Excel or Google Sheets), you might want a developer to help with a few extra bits, or check if your platform can support them.

  • If you can, turn on Google Pay as Google is going to love featuring a product that can be bought using it’s payment services quickly and easily.
  • Also make sure you’ve got structured data in place on your products so that Google knows exactly what you’re selling and it doesn’t need to worry that Gemini is interpreting anything incorrectly.
  • Make sure your stock availability is clear – ensure Gemini knows that your product is available to be bought right now. And do what you can to your supply chains to ensure that message never dips into “out of stock”.
  • Have a run through of your whole check out process and look for any friction – pretend you’re a first time visitor and try and detect if anything holds you up or is unclear. If it is, fix it. And if you can’t tell, hire me to tell you or just go to a coffee shop and offer to buy someone a coffee if they’ll test your website for you.

Get ahead with reviews

If you haven’t previously chased reviews, then this is the year that needs to change. (Note to self.) And start now, before absolutely everyone else starts doing it too. Rather than 3 5 star reviews, try and get hundreds or thousands, and make sure those results are clear for the robots (again, structured data is your friend here). Reviews are a huge indicator to AI that a product should be recommended or not.

Even when Google offer you the option to pay to appear in it’s shopping mode, AI will still want to make the best suggestions and so all of the ground work you do here isn’t a temporary stop gap, it’s the foundations of people finding your products via Gemini.

If you want to be kept up to date with important web news like this, as well as getting a suggestion for 1 thing a week to do on your website to keep moving it forward, make sure you’re on my mailing list to get my Tuesday emails.