f you let generative AI pick your next tech purchase to save five minutes of scrolling, you are paying a hefty premium for your laziness. A detailed investigation by Product Rise reveals that when the exact same gadget surfaces in both Google's experimental AI Mode and regular Search, the AI summary delivers a price tag that is 21.6% higher on average.
Product Rise ran simultaneous hardware queries across both AI Mode and traditional search results in the US and the UK. Across the entire basket of tracked products, AI Mode consistently favored high-margin alternatives, pushing the median catalog price up by roughly 49%—from $100 in standard search to $149 in the generative view.
"AI Mode showed a price that was 21.6% higher on average."
Prices drifted apart on 38% of the tracked items. Worse, whenever a price discrepancy cropped up between the two interfaces, Google's AI interface pushed the more expensive listing roughly two out of three times.
Shuffling the Deck
This is not a rounding fluke; it is an entirely different storefront masquerading as an objective buyer's guide. Only 1.28% of the specific listings surfaced in regular search made it into the AI Mode overview for identical queries. The featured merchant differed almost half the time, prioritizing big-box retailers and ad-heavy marketplaces over leaner local discount outlets.
Google naturally pushed back, claiming it has not independently verified Product Rise's figures and insisting that both interfaces draw from the same underlying Shopping Graph. Yet if both engines read the same database while AI Mode consistently extracts an extra 21.6% from your wallet, algorithmic shopping looks less like a personal concierge and more like an automated upsell engine. Until platforms prove their generative summaries favor buyer value over merchant margins, cross-checking the classic search tab remains mandatory.