Marketplaces ·
With Google AI Mode splitting shopping carousels into Sponsored and All products rows, how do you make sure your products can show up in the organic row?
An afternoon Google
Short answer
Make sure your Merchant Center products are eligible for free listings, not just Shopping ads, and fix the disapprovals and missing attributes that keep them out. Then run your main queries in AI Mode and write down which row each product lands in.
On October 28 Search Engine Land reported a Google test that puts Sponsored and All products headings on AI Mode shopping carousels, and Google confirmed that Shopping Ads can sit alongside organic results there. The sponsored row is a budget question. The organic row is a data question, and for most brands it is filled from Merchant Center free listings and the product data on their own pages. A brand that only ever set up Merchant Center for ads can find that some products are approved for ads but limited or excluded for free listings. Nobody notices, because ad reports look fine. Google also says click-through rates in AI Mode are already similar between sponsored and organic product listings, so an empty organic row is not a small gap.
Do this
- In Merchant Center, check that free listings are turned on for your products and that the country is set to the United States.
- Open product diagnostics and filter by free listings. List every product that is disapproved or limited and the reason Google gives.
- Fill the attributes most likely to be missing on CPG listings: GTIN, brand, size or count, and a title that names the product type in the first few words.
- Pick ten queries a shopper would type for your category and run them in AI Mode on a phone. Screenshot the carousel and note whether each of your products is in Sponsored, All products or neither.
- Repeat the same ten queries once a month and keep the screenshots, so you can see whether a fix moved a product into the organic row.
Effort is our estimate for a small brand team. Assistant tags come from the assistants this tip names. See also AI shopping assistants compared.