Google AI Mode Shopping: What if the Purchase Happens Before the user reaching your website

 Google seems to be testing and expanding the “Buy Now” experience directly within AI Mode itself.

What does that mean?

The user may no longer need to visit the merchant website to complete the purchase.

Everything from product discovery and comparison to checkout could increasingly happen within Google’s AI experience itself.

While organic product listings still remain, this is an important shift that is slowly taking shape in the US.

And this is where Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Google Merchant Centre become important.

UCP is designed to allow e-commerce experiences such as native checkout directly across Google surfaces like AI Mode and Gemini, while the retailer still remains the Merchant of Record.

What should businesses and agencies do?

If you are running an ecommerce business, don’t look at this only as another Google Search feature.

Start looking at your Merchant Centre + Product Feed + Development + Analytics ecosystem together.

Google’s UCP documentation already points towards requirements around:

What can we expect?

• Potentially fewer clicks to PDP pages
• less traffic reaching the ecommerce website before purchase.
• However, that does not necessarily mean fewer transactions.
• It means the journey between discovery and transaction is changing.

MY THOUGHT ---> Please feel free to the article with others

This is where attribution modelling becomes even more important.

If discovery happens in AI Mode, product comparison happens in AI Mode and eventually checkout also happens there, measuring ecommerce performance purely through website sessions and last-click conversions will tell only part of the story.

Advanced analytics and custom tracking will become increasingly important.

And interestingly, Google Merchant Centre itself is moving in this direction, with UCP integration tools providing visibility into the agentic checkout funnel.

So if you are an ecommerce business owner — small, medium or enterprise — in India or the US, this is probably the right time to bring your:

High Priority: SEO / Ecommerce + Merchant Centre + Development + Analytics teams together.

Not because every merchant needs to implement this tomorrow.

But because the technical foundation for agentic commerce is already being built.

Your ecommerce website may increasingly become the commerce infrastructure behind the transaction, even when the customer journey itself happens somewhere else.

Below are screenshots showing the current experience in India alongside the US experience where the buying journey is already beginning to move inside AI Mode.

#SEO #GoogleMerchantCentre #GoogleProductfeeds #PerformanceMarketing #AISEARCH #Advanceanalytics #SEOAnalytics

India Screenshot

US Screenshot

Google AI Testing Buy Now

Important Note: The UCP Merchant Centre onboarding is currently gradually rolling out in the US, with Australia and Canada expected later; Google's documentation says the current program scope applies to US-sold products

Additional Source

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Closing Thought

The buying journey may be changing, but the opportunity for businesses remains the same — be present wherever the customer chooses to buy.

For now, this is an early shift worth watching, understanding and preparing for.

Google's Search Result Blunder

Well.... you guys gonna love this for sure and i am sure if the person involved in this would have seen this.. He would ask questions to Google lol.

Ok, so it  was rainy day and FIFA 14 fever was on the rise. I just finished watching the Germans thrashing the Brazilians 7 - 1. After this match, i had nothing to do, so i started searching for underworld dons and wanted in India.

While browsing i stumbled upon a character named 'Sharad Shetty' - One of the top aides of D's Boss and the man who used to control betting racket.

I searched for this guy and was astonished to see the result, refer below snapshot:

Well, at the very first sight i saw the image of a young guy carrying a bag on his shoulder appeared in what Google calls as Knowledge Graph.

For a moment i was stunned and couldn't believe the fact that 'How can a young guy like him' control international betting racket and chains of hotel in Dubai.

So thought of further investigation, i again searched the same name in Google Image Search and see what i found -

                           Source: http://www.geocities.ws/organizedcrimesyndicates/shetty-sharod1.jpg


Yes, above image is of Sharad Shetty who died in an Gang war inside a hotel in Dubai...

Well, now it was all clear in my mind that something is wrong with Knowledge Graph. So went ahead to investigate who the other guy was..

So i again went back to Google Web Search and searched for the name, after that i clicked on the image of the guy whose image was being pulled and guys believe me i still cant believe Google can do such blunder...

Se the result below -

                               Source: http://mypage.rediff.com/sharad-shetty/31511130

OMG!! this is a common Guy from a City in the state of Maharashtra (India) who is a teenage may be and going to college.. Check his profile details.

How cruel it can be .. the person is a youngster and is being projected as a Dubai based gangster, top aides of D boss and the most funniest part born 1979 - died 2003..

One More Observation

Knowledge graph shows born as 1979(Some other source) while the first result in the SERP shows born as 1954(Wikipedia), Refer snapshot -

After all Google is a machine it happens to do such blunders and it still works on keywords based queries... if you go in-depth then you would know that 'Sharad Shetty's' image of picture is not that much around the web and may be the young guys profile may have been tagged as Gangster. don't know the reason.
however i am just afraid if this happens again and this time apart from a young guy a great politician/personality appear... then would want to see the consequences.

Any ways for now hope Google sees this and correct the same.

Written By Vijayraj Nadar

I have been working in the field of digital marketing with 4 years of experience, i have handled many clients right from stock market broker, online eCommerce store. you can find me on my Google + Profile or Twitter Profile: 

                                                              

How To Be Safe From Google Penguin Update Or What To Do If You Have Been Hit By Penguin Update

Couple of days ago Matt Cutts the head of web spam team in Google announced next generation of penguin being rolled out. Its not new for SEO's but some people experienced its magnitude and were hit badly by this update so i decided on writing a post on it.

So what is Penguin?

Google launched this update for the first time in April 2012 the main aim of this update was to target spammers who were using unethical works like link networks to manipulate search engine rankings

This was the time when the whole SEO industry was in state of shock as many lost their rankings traffic and drastically.

So What Are Possible Problem What Does Penguin actually Targets?

• Link networks
• Advertorials
• Paid Links
• Directories
• Abusing Your Anchor Text of External Links
• Excessive Unnecessary Internal Linking
• Links From Bad Domain
• Links From Penalized Site

So What Is The First Step To Recover Your Site If You Have Been Hit By Penguin Algorithm Update?

·         Check if you have received any Penalty warning in Google Webmaster Tools

·         Basic ranks check should be done to check which of your keywords have been affected

• Check You Link Profile In Google Webmaster( External Linking Sites & Internal Linking)

          Identify domain from whom you are receiving enormous amount of link and create a ratio of linking     domains to the linking pages (This is totally a personal call) If see the ratio being fishy then mark those domains

For Example refer below table

Linking Domain	External Links	Linked Pages
www.xyz.com	10000	1

From the above example you can clearly see that this is not natural link.

Once indentified such domains contact webmasters of these sites and get your listing removed

•   Directory Check

There are possibilities that you may not have build directory links but some SEO agency did that for you as directories are the best and easy way to manipulate SERP

 Identify list of such directories run a thorough audit on them, parameters to check are:

1. Whether the directory indexed or not, this can be done using site: command operator
2. Check for Porn, Gambling & Casino

After running these check the site which doesn't passes the above parameters should be marked and the webmasters of those sites should be contacted to remove your listings.

• Check Your Backlink Profile

Use tools like OpenSiteExplorer, MajesticSeo or Ahrefs to check your backlink profile. Extract the data and check your anchor text diversity for the pages that seems to have taken a hit analyse them and if you feel that your link profile is not natural then you should start contacting the site webmasters from where you have acquired those links and ask them to change the anchor text or remove your links.

An Ideal Link profile should have diverse anchor text like:

20% Exact match

20% Phrase Match

15% Phrase + Brand Name

15% Brand Name

10% URL

5% Long tail

Note: Above classification is on the basis of personal experience

Once all the clean ups are done from your side depending on what kind of penalty have you received depends the recovering of site.

If you have received warning message in Google Webmaster then you need to file a reconsideration request to Google once received they will verify and check your site for quality guidelines and provide you the feedback accordingly.

If you haven’t received any message then you have been hit by Algorithmic change in this case there are chances you need to just play waiting game until next penguin update or next data refresh is done by Google.

We all know the above mentioned stuffs are quite tiring but that’s what we need to do.

More Advance post coming keep sharing and keep learning.

Written By Vijayraj Nadar

I have been working in the field of digital marketing with over 3 years of experience, i have handled many clients right from stock market broker, online ecommerce store. you can find me on my Google + Profile or Twitter Profile: