An Introduction to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search for Commerce and the 4 Features of that Help Retailers Increase the Revenue per Visit | by Allan Alfonso | Google Cloud – Community | May, 2025

Vertex AI Search for Commerce offers Search and Browse, Conversation, Recommendations, and Vision capabilities

Where does the buying journey begin?

For most of us, it’s Google. People come to the world’s most popular search engine to explore options, compare features, and make informed purchasing decisions. According to a study from Google and IPSOS in Eastern Europe, for nearly every product and service they surveyed, Search came out on top as the first touchpoint.

If search is so important in the customer journey, how can we take the power of Google Search and bring it to Retail?

• Search and Browse: Think of this as Google Search for your website. The difference between regular Google Search and Vertex AI for Commerce Search is that Commerce Search is highly tuned for retail by using a bunch of proprietary Google signals to provide relevant search results and to rank those relevant search results to optimize the revenue per visit.
• Conversation: Google uses AI to provide a more interactive conversational search experience.
• Recommendations: These are personalized product recommendations to help your customer find the next best product. For example, you may see “others you may like” or “frequently bought together” items that are specific to you on the website.
• Vision: Search for a product using images. If you’ve ever used Google Lens to search for something, this is a similar.

Search has two core challenges: Relevance and Ranking.

• Relevance: What does the query mean? What products match this query?
• Ranking: What order do I put the relevant products in? What products have the highest expected revenue?

Who does search better than Google?

Search and Browse is Google quality search fine-tuned for commerce, leveraging Google’s advanced AI models and proprietary insights. It analyzes customer profiles and shopping behavior to deliver relevant, personalized results, and ranks them to optimize for key metrics like revenue per visit and conversion rates. A key strength is its understanding of user intent (semantic understanding), even for complex long-tail queries.

Search and Browse helps your customer discover products on your site as easy as you find information on Google Search.

Conversation is the newest feature and the focus of 2025.

Bed Bath and Beyond uses conversational filtering on its website. Customers are asked AI generated questions to help them filter search results. Questions are dynamically presented that make sense for each shopping journey.

The next phase of Conversation is conversational commerce.

Customer can enter a request in the search bar such as “I need a summer party dress”. Conversational Commerce will recognize if it’s a product request or a conversational query. If it’s a conversational query, Conversational Commerce will start asking your customer questions and engage in a conversation (why it’s called call conversational commerce) to understand their intent and start showing relevant, personalized search results.

Conversation can handles complex queries that might not be mapped to products or metadata by leveraging Google’s AI reasoning capabilities.

The goal of Recommendations is cart expansion.

It analyzes your site’s products and customer behavior to build recommendation models such as “Frequently Bought Together” and “Recommended for You”. For example, if a Macy’s customer is buying a comforter for their bed, Recommendations can suggest sheets and pillows to pair with the comforter. Customers can then easily add these recommended products to their cart.

The recommendation models predict the next best products a customer is most likely interested to engage or convert with.

Customers can use the Vision feature to search for products by simply providing a picture.

Victoria’s Secret uses this feature on its website. For example, customers can upload any picture of a bra and Commerce Search will return Victoria’s Secret bras that best match the photo. This experience is faster and easier than searching pages and pages of bras on their website.

Vision takes advantage of Google’s multi-modal AI capabilities to offer your customers different ways to search for products.

The best way to understand how Vertex AI Search for Commerce can help you your business is through an A/B test.

On average, Google Commerce Search customers are seeing:

• +12% click through rate
• +7% conversion rate lift
• +6% revenue per visit
• 15x return on investment

Reach out to your Google Cloud Account Team or a Google Cloud Partner to discuss how Google Cloud Vertex AI Search for Commerce can be a part of your customer’s shopping journey.