Google’s AI Mode raises product prices by 21.6% compared to Search

If you’ve been using Google’s AI Mode to shop, you might want to check your receipts. A study by Productrise analyzing over 2 million product listings found that prices displayed in AI Mode averaged 21.6% higher than identical items surfaced through traditional Google Search.

The analysis, which tracked 100,000 search and AI responses over 23 days from August 9 to August 31, 2026, paints a picture of two very different shopping experiences living under the same Google roof.

The numbers tell a striking story

Traditional Google Search returned an average of 27.8 products per query. AI Mode? Just 3.9. That’s roughly seven times fewer options, which already limits a shopper’s ability to comparison-shop before clicking “buy.”

The overlap between the two experiences was almost nonexistent. Only 1.28% of products that ranked in traditional search also appeared in AI Mode for the same query on the same day. So it’s not just that AI Mode is showing you the same products at higher prices. It’s showing you almost entirely different products.

When the study did find matching products across both surfaces, the pricing gaps were hard to ignore. About 38.1% of matched items showed price differences between the two modes. Of those disagreements, AI Mode was the more expensive option 68.4% of the time, carrying a median price premium of 22.2%.

Zooming out to the full product universe each mode surfaced, the median product price in AI Mode clocked in at $149, compared to $100 in traditional search. That’s a 49% gap in the typical price point shoppers encounter.

Even the merchants differed. The primary seller listed first for matched products changed nearly half the time, with a 49.6% variance rate between AI Mode and traditional search.

Same data, different results

Google’s response to the findings was straightforward: both AI Mode and traditional search pull from the same Shopping Graph, the company’s massive product database that aggregates listings across retailers. Shoppers can click through any listing to compare prices from multiple sellers.

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