A new shopping study says Google’s AI Mode may be steering users toward more expensive products than traditional search does. The report, published by Productrise, compares the same products appearing in both systems and finds that when a product showed up in both places, the AI Mode price was about 21.6% higher on average.
The study tracked shopping queries over 23 days, from August 9 to August 31, 2026, across the U.S. and U.K. It says researchers monitored more than 2 million product listings across more than 100,000 search engine results pages and AI Mode responses, then matched identical products between the two surfaces on the same day and at the same moment. That matching step matters, because it narrows the comparison to items that were directly available in both experiences rather than to different products that merely happened to answer the same query.
According to the report, the price gap is not just a quirk of one or two categories. It appears in the subset of matched products that the study treated as the cleanest apples-to-apples comparison. On that basis, the authors argue that AI Mode is not simply reorganizing the same shopping information. It may also be changing the apparent price structure in ways that matter for consumer choice.
The study also points to a broader product mix difference between the two search experiences. That part of the analysis suggests AI Mode and conventional search do not always surface the same goods, even when they answer the same shopping intent. The practical implication is that users may not be getting a neutral rearrangement of the same market. They may be seeing a different basket of products as well as a different set of prices.
Because this is a company-independent data study, it should be read as evidence about behavior rather than as proof of motive. The authors do not claim that Google deliberately favors more expensive products. They show that, within their sample and matching method, the AI Mode experience produced a higher average price for the same item. That is a useful finding, but it does not by itself explain why the gap exists.
Still, the result lands in a sensitive area for search products. Shopping search sits at the intersection of ranking, recommendation, monetization, and user trust. If a generative search layer consistently surfaces costlier products, even unintentionally, consumers may end up spending more while believing they are getting the most relevant answer. The question is especially important because AI Mode is presented as a more conversational way to search, not merely a different ad surface.
The study will probably invite replication. Its own method suggests how to do that: run the same shopping queries at the same time across both systems, match the exact products, and compare prices and product mix over a sustained period. For now, the headline finding is simple. In this sample, the same item cost more in Google AI Mode than in traditional search, and the difference was large enough to notice.
