Google I/O 2025 Was Mostly a Shopping Story

Google I/O ran in May and the coverage was, as ever, dominated by the things that photograph well: Gemini doing impressive multimodal things, Project Astra being eerily context-aware, the AI Mode search interface looking slick in a keynote setting.

What came out of the announcements, though, was actually a commerce story. And it was substantial.

Google's official shopping post covered several distinct things that are worth separating out, because they have different implications and different timelines.

AI Mode and What It Does to Search Traffic

AI Mode is Google's answer to the question everyone in SEO has been asking since AI Overviews started appearing: what happens to search when AI generates the answer? AI Mode extends this further. It is a conversational interface within Search where you can explore a topic across multiple turns, with Google synthesising across sources rather than returning links.

For ecommerce, the direction this is pointing is that product discovery through Google is shifting from "type a query, get a results page, click a link" toward "describe what you're looking for, have a conversation, be directed to products."

The implications for how retailers structure their product content (I wrote about this last summer in the context of GEO) are becoming more concrete. AI Mode surfaces content based on how well it answers the likely question, not how well it matches keywords. Semrush's research on AI Overview query intent is clarifying here: transactional queries triggering AI Overviews rose from under 2% in October 2024 to nearly 14% by October 2025. The commercial category rose from 8% to nearly 19% over the same period.

Most retailers built their SEO strategies on the assumption that ranking in organic results was the game. That assumption is getting eroded.

Agentic Checkout: the Part Worth Paying Attention To

The feature that came out of I/O with the least fanfare but the most structural significance was agentic checkout. Google announced the ability to set a price alert on a product and, optionally, have Google complete the purchase automatically via Google Pay when the price drops to your threshold.

This is, in a quiet way, quite a significant thing. It is Google, not a retailer or a brand, sitting between the consumer's intent and the transaction. The consumer specifies what they want and at what price. Google monitors availability and pricing across its Shopping Graph. Google executes the purchase when conditions are met.

The checkout experience, the brand moment, the opportunity to cross-sell or build a relationship: all of that gets compressed into a price-matching exercise where the only variable the consumer cares about is whether the thing arrived.

That is not necessarily bad for consumers. It might be efficient and convenient. It is a different kind of commercial relationship than ecommerce has been building for twenty-five years.

Virtual Try-On

Google also announced a significant upgrade to virtual try-on at I/O. Where the original feature (launched in 2023) showed garments on a range of diverse models, the new version lets shoppers upload their own photo and see how a specific piece of clothing looks on them. Shirts, trousers, skirts, dresses: the system is powered by a custom image generation model that understands how different materials fold, stretch and drape on different body types.

This is part of a longer story. Google has been building virtual try-on into the Shopping Graph for a few years now, but the quality and coverage have reached a point where it is worth retailers paying attention to whether their products are indexed and optimised for it. The experiment is rolling out via Search Labs in the US; there is no confirmed UK timeline yet.

Project Mariner

Project Mariner is Google's computer-use agent that can browse the web and complete tasks on a user's behalf. At I/O it gained multitasking capabilities and a "teach and repeat" feature, where you show it a task once and it learns plans for similar tasks in future. It is now available to developers via the Gemini API, with broader access expected from summer 2025.

The commerce implication is the same one running through everything at I/O: Google is building toward a world where an agent browses, evaluates, and purchases on behalf of the consumer. Project Mariner is the infrastructure for the browsing and evaluation parts. Agentic checkout is the infrastructure for the purchase part. They connect.

Put it together and Google is describing an end state where a consumer says "find me a good waterproof running jacket under £150, check reviews, and order the best one when the price is right." The agent handles everything from search to checkout. The retailer fulfils the order.

Whether that end state arrives in 2026 or 2030 or 2035 is genuinely unclear. But the pieces are pointing somewhere, and that is worth sitting with.