In case you need another reason to maintain a strong online presence for your business, Google recently announced two new upgrades to Google Shopping — an upgrade to its Google Lens visual search tool and an enhanced, AI-powered search experience — just in time for holiday shopping season.

How does Google Lens work? 

Google plans to incorporate shopping ads into image search results, giving consumers a quick way to find — and buy — products they see out in the wild. It’s as easy as snapping a cell phone photo of an item, then clicking the Google Lens search icon next to the search bar to select your photo and browse online products that match it.

This new Google Lens update combines advanced AI technology with Google’s database of information on over 45 billion products, also known as the Google Shopping Graph. The resulting shopping ads will include details like reviews, price comparisons and options for purchasing. That’s good news for retailers with an up-to-date website that features high resolution product images and current pricing information.

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If you’re wondering how much of an impact Google Lens could have on your business, consider this. According to Google, approximately 20 billion visual searches are made via Lens every month and 20 percent of those searches are made with the intention of shopping. Granted, these are global statistics; yet, given that we are talking billions, it is not unreasonable to believe that the number of searches in the U.S. alone is not only high but likely growing each year. In fact, “Lens queries are now one of the fastest growing query types on Search,” as reported by Retail Brew.

How is Google Shopping changing? 

Like Google Lens, the new and improved shopping feature combines Google’s Shopping Graph database with AI technology. And it works with any text-based search queries. While Google Shopping has been around for a while, its search results lacked in the areas of filtering and personalization.

This next iteration of Google Shopping not only shows more relevant product results, but it also comes with an “AI-generated brief with top things to consider for your search, plus products that meet your needs,” according to Sean Scott, VP and GM Consumer Shopping for Google. New filter options will allow shoppers to refine results by various intuitive categories, including size and “available near you now” — which is especially exciting for Independent retailers who have an intentional and well-executed omnichannel strategy. Overall, the intention is to eliminate frustration by simplifying and speeding up the search process.

The timing of the upcoming rollouts for Google Lens and Google Shopping are expected to help holiday shoppers, but the effects on retail sales — both online and in-store — will continue long after December 25. Already, 83 percent of shoppers who visit a store in person will at least sometimes research online first. And even in-store shoppers are more likely to simultaneously search online before making a purchase decision. In fact, 87 percent of shoppers in the U.S. and Canada use their phones in-store to research a product at least some of the time, with the top three reasons being price comparison, reading customer reviews and looking up detailed product information.

Google is about to make consumers’ shopping research a whole lot easier. Is your website ready?