Callum says: “My additional insight is that e-commerce brands should be focusing on, or optimizing for, Google organic product grids.

I'm going to talk a bit around how to go about that, and what we should be bringing into SEO as a channel from some of the areas that we've previously neglected.”

Sounds good. So, what are Google organic product grids?

“Google organic product grids are the tiles that you see that display products – sort of like Google Shopping ads; in the same format, but typically in grids starting from 8 and going up to 16 products, in some cases.

It can return results for most commercial queries. If you were shopping for a product, you may have seen them. If you search for something as basic as ‘running shoes’, or any longer tail queries, you may return these organic product grids, depending on where you are in the world.

If you're in the United States, you'll be very, very familiar with these. If you're in the UK, probably equally as familiar, but less so depending on what you're shopping for.”

I would imagine it depends on the nature of the keyword phrase that's being entered and searched for.

Are we just focusing on product type keyword phrases?

“Yes and no. There are some things that you would previously have expected to only return category pages for in the search results – the typical 10 blue links.

If you were searching for washing machines, for example, you're probably going to want to do a bit of research, like browsing on a website like Currys, in the UK. Whereas now, that browsing experience could be within the Google SERPs, if the product grids do appear, where you will directly be seeing products and not doing that browsing experience.

There are a few things to be said around the saturation of these as well – how frequently they do appear – and it is more than you might be aware of.”

Are there certain types of products/certain categories of businesses that are more likely to be able to take advantage of these product grids?

“If you are selling products online, then you can take advantage of them. It’s as simple as that.

There have been studies done by a number of people who are way more involved in this than I am. Bear in mind, we work predominantly with e-commerce agencies, but the optimization for Google organic product grids is only one part of a larger strategy, a lot of the time. There are some guys who have dedicated a lot of time to this.

For example, there is somebody called Tom Rusling. He took a set of 61,000 e-commerce-focused keywords, and within the test group, 70% of those keywords returned three or more product grids within the search results. It's very likely that those 61,000 keywords had something related to every type of e-commerce business in there.

If you're selling something online, then yes, there’s very likely going to be a need to optimize for these.”

What stage of the buyer journey are we talking about here?

Are we just talking about product-centric keyword phrases that people are likely to type in when they've already made a decision, in terms of what they would like to buy, but they're just looking to see where the best value is in terms of that product, or can we get a little bit earlier in terms of the user buyer journey?

“That is why it's so important, because it is across the entire buyer journey, unfortunately. The only place it's not going to appear is in that initial research. If you were searching for something like ‘the best headphones to buy in 2025’, it's probably not going to appear. You're still going to see the TechRadars/the comparison sites.

But as soon as you start searching for ‘wireless headphones’ or ‘Bluetooth headphones’, or even going as far as a specific model of Sony headphones, all of those are very likely going to return these product grids.

I haven't done the testing on all of those phrases, but I can say with quite a lot of confidence that you would see some for those queries.”

What kind of results are we likely to get from things like click-through rate and position on the SERP, in comparison to the standard blue links, and also maybe in comparison with paid results as well?

“The paid results will still appear at the top, in that strip format – so, one strip that can be scrolled over to the right on mobile. You just interact with it and slide across. But, in a lot of cases, we are seeing that popular products grid appear at the top, before any blue links, which is why it's so important to optimize for.

In most cases, it's about 8 products that would sit at the top, and then you would have the standard blue links underneath. It could be a case where you would get that popular products grid, then three blue links, and then another grid with more products. So, you are having your click-through rates massively impacted.

Just for the datasets that we have access to, we have seen that, where these have started appearing more and more, click-through rates have declined for category pages, but by optimizing for these, we're not missing out on revenue, basically.

The clicks have gone down, but the overall revenue has stayed or grown.”

You mentioned the phrase ‘optimizing for these opportunities’. You also talk about getting involved with the Merchant Center.

How do we actually start to appear in these product grids?

“There are two things that you have in your control here. You have the Merchant Center, and anything that's on-site. On-site is going to be the most familiar for a lot of SEOs in terms of what we can do. You're talking about the details that are on your product page itself.

They have, I would say, the lowest amount of impact and then above that, you have structured data, and then Merchant Center. Merchant Center and structured data are the two things that you'd want to spend a lot of time on.

I would say the most important thing is actually making sure you're eligible to appear in these product grids. There are quite a few ways in which your eligibility to show in organic product grids, or free listings, is hampered.

Through Merchant Center, you could have Merchant Center errors that could stop you from being visible, but then you could also have things going wrong with your structured data that would cause issues in visibility, and you would just get a blanket issue that’s almost like: ‘unavailable to show results’.”

Shall we dive into some things that you've seen go wrong and how to actually correct them?

Maybe within the Merchant Center, what kind of errors do you tend to see?

“This is where it steps outside of your typical SEO remit. With Merchant Center, typically, the control will be held by PPC teams, paid teams, or maybe another agency – a paid agency – and they will typically be more aware of the types of things that can stop a feed from working, basically. Things like data mismatches between on-page and what's in your feed.

I’m trying to think of a specific example. In your feed, if you had a t-shirt that's available in three colours, but one colour is discounted and the pricing is mismatched because of that, that could disallow that product from appearing in the feed. It can happen more frequently than it sounds. Simple things like having shipping pricing differences can also cause that to happen.

Then, from an on-site perspective, there's another really solid expert in the space, Brodie Clark, who has talked about one specific issue that I've seen a few times as well, which is around using aggregate offers. Again, it's that pricing element. The AggregateOffer schema can cause an issue with price matching with the information that's in your feed.

Now, Google have new support for this (I say ‘new support’, I think it's about a year old): Product Variant Schema. If you can make the move to that, that typically fixes this, if you do it right. It's relatively complex, but it's a long-term solution for it.

In the situation where we had a t-shirt with three different colours, you would apply a ProductVariant schema that would have the accurate data that relates to the same data that's in your product feed. They would all be: ‘a yellow t-shirt is £30’, ‘a blue t-shirt is £25’, etc., and that would be replicated across your feed and in your structured data.”

Is this something that's supported by other search engines as well, or is it just Google?

“The feed itself is supported by other search engines, but in terms of the methods for optimization, this is literally just Google. There is an area of... I kind of didn't want to talk about AI, but…

So, SearchGPT (ChatGPT Search) is releasing support for product feeds. I don't know if you've done much shopping research in ChatGPT, but you can show product tiles. At the moment, that is pulled from information that it can find on your site – that on-site thing. What it doesn't have is support for a feed.

Now, they are going to add in feed support, which means the optimizations will be very similar for AI-based search eventually.”

Will it be likely that we'll have to submit a feed to AI search engines, or will AI search engines just find a feed on our website?

“According to the landing page that I've seen, on the ChatGPT landing page, they want you to submit a feed. It's not open yet (as far as I know), but when it does open, it will be a feed submission – and you can use the feed that you submit to Merchant Center for it. It'll use the same format.”

How do you measure success from these opportunities?

Will traditional SEO software tools be able to tell us what we're ranking in these product grids, what our click-through rate is, and those types of metrics?

“Being completely transparent, it's harder than tracking traditional ’10 blue links’ search. The way we've done it is through three different things. You have Google Analytics for actual product data/product URL-level data: clicks from organic revenue through those products, et cetera, et cetera. Just your usual stuff.

Then, for Search Console, you have ‘search appearance’, so you can see when these do appear, and how often they are clicked as well. Obviously, there is a level of sampling that goes into this, so for longer tail queries, which are more likely to bring in these product-level clicks, you might be missing a chunk of data in Search Console.

Then there is the third area, which I've not been super hands-on with. You can track appearance for product grids within tools like Semrush and Ahrefs. I know for a fact you can do it in Ahrefs – the actual appearance of these product grid features against terms that you rank for as well.

You can see where you need to optimize for, if that makes sense, but you can't necessarily see where your products are showing.”

In terms of where your products are showing, in an order, how do you influence that?

It's one thing to get featured in these product grids, and it's another thing to be the most prominent result in there. Are there elements, such as reviews or the existing authority/relevance of a website, that impact where the product is positioned?

“This question actually has the most frustrating answer. The actual answer to this is that the biggest impact comes from things like price (if you have a sale on, if your products are just cheaper), free shipping, and returns policies. Those are massive movers in terms of where you appear in this. They are probably the most influential factors, but there are some levels of optimization that you can do.

I wouldn't neglect the areas of optimizing things like your product name. One way to think about the optimization of the content on a product page – let's take the t-shirt example. With brands such as Nike, in their product name, it will be a t-shirt, but in the actual name on the page, it might just say something like ‘Nike Dri-FIT’, which is a product brand thing that they have.

That might go into the feed (this is something we have seen, by the way) as just ‘men's Nike Dri-FIT’ or whatever, but that is actually the name of a t-shirt, and it doesn't say ‘t-shirt’. You would be completely unaware of this because, looking at your website, you can clearly see it's a t-shirt. You're not thinking that this data that's going into the feed is incorrect, basically.

What you would then do is manually adjust the feed to say something like ‘men's Nike Dri-FIT t-shirt’, and then possibly the colour as well (that would be great if you could get that in there). Then you can also mark up, in the structured data and also in the feed’s additional details, the colour, the product type, and then a really good quality description as well – as much information as possible that is relevant to that product.

We have found success in making sure that, if your feed contains certain information, your structured data replicates that to the letter, basically. It's easier for you, as well, if you make those two match.”

Callum, what's a key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“It is hard to summarise, but I would say the key takeaway is making sure that you are taking more control over this now.

It is happening right now and, in my opinion, it's more important than focusing on optimizing for AI-based search – which is where I see a lot of the thought going at the moment, especially within e-commerce: ‘How do I get my product in AI-based search?’

We’re starting to call some people ‘GEO’. I would say, have that as a future plan, focus on this now. You will see results next week, not in two years’ time.”

Callum Lockwood is the head of SEO at Re:signal, and you can find him over at Resignal.com.