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Google wants to add another way for shoppers to get more information about retailers by adding a new tally AI summary of online store reviews that can be accessed when they visit the website.
As you can see in this example, Google is rolling out new options for Chrome, so shoppers can easily access a cumulative overview of company reviews while they are visiting the site.
To view reviews, you can immediately tap the info icon to the left of the URL in your Chrome web browser (not available on mobile at this stage). This activates the dropdown summary. This includes AI-generated summary of available reviews.
As Google explained:
“Google collects highly-reputed websites that aggregate business reviews and ratings from Google users. These ratings primarily reflect the overall consumer experience after customer fulfillment, country-based in your business.”
Although we want to note that rather than using AI to create reviews, we simply summarise them into a single paragraph, the list also includes star ratings for businesses based on Google reviews.
While some brands are keen to control what information they are displayed, you will definitely be sure to make sure this is a positive reflection of your brand, it may definitely be a convenient way to gather more information about your business.
The risk in this regard is that AI summary can make things wrong and can highlight the wrong points. This may be negative for the business. However, at least in theory, these summaries are less easy to manipulate than typical Google reviews, and the summary should well reflect overall business feedback.
Adding another extended SEO style consideration to your brand is still a good thing for consumers.
And if that catches up, your Google reviews can become even more important as consumers can access those insights whenever they visit your site. So, not only will you try to beat the first click, but how to check it will be available at every stage. This is worth considering depending on how Google appears to highlight this.
This is another addition to Google's evolving shopping tools, aiming to help the platform dodge the competition in searches and remain an important destination for discovery.
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