What Google's AI is doing to Australian online retail

01 · The headline number

E-commerce is the second-most AI-exposed industry in Australia

E-commerce sat just behind Accounting in our overall rankings, with 52.5% of commercial product-related searches returning a Google AI Overview. On its own, that number is striking. But the surprise in the e-commerce data wasn't the headline. It was the shape of the data underneath, which inverts almost every assumption we'd built from analysing the other 17 verticals.

Three findings in particular are unique to e-commerce among the verticals we measured: desktop AIO exposure is higher than mobile, adding a location to a query increases AIO trigger rate instead of reducing it, and Google itself is the most-cited source. Each one rewrites a standard piece of SEO advice.

02 · The intent breakdown

Commercial intent is the danger zone

We split every e-commerce query into one of four intents (informational, commercial, transactional, navigational) and measured each separately. The commercial number is where e-commerce diverges sharply from every other vertical we tested.

Commercial-intent trigger sits at 68.1% for e-commerce. By comparison, commercial intent in Accounting runs at 33.4%, Real Estate at 28.1%, Trades at 21.7%. E-commerce is more than double those benchmarks. The "best running shoes Australia", "compare dishwashers", "Sony vs Bose noise cancelling" comparison-shopping query, the bread and butter of e-commerce content marketing, is now AI-mediated for two thirds of searches.

Informational intent runs hotter still at 77.4%, in line with our expectations. The surprise was transactional intent at 50.9%, far higher than the dataset baseline of 34.6%. Australian transactional e-commerce queries carry strong definitional and comparative components ("which Dyson is best", "are HelloFresh meals worth it"), and the AI treats them as opportunities to write a buyer's guide rather than send the user to a checkout page.

The only intent class where you still get a clean first impression is navigational at 25.6%: brand queries, login pages, "amazon.com.au returns". Brand demand is now the most defensible signal an e-commerce business has.

03 · Mobile vs desktop

E-commerce is the rare vertical where desktop is worse

We split the dataset by device expecting another mobile-skewed result (it's the pattern in 16 of 18 industries we measured). E-commerce inverted.

Desktop AIO exposure runs 1.8pp higher than mobile for Australian e-commerce. It's only a small gap, but it's notable because it's directionally opposite to almost every other vertical (Accounting +7.1pp mobile, Legal +7.2pp mobile, Travel +5.2pp mobile, and so on).

Our reading: more e-commerce research happens on desktop. Multiple tabs, comparison tables, spreadsheets tracking prices across sites. That's exactly the use case Google's AI is best at summarising, so it shows up more often on desktop e-commerce SERPs than the equivalent mobile session.

Recommendation: if your AIO presence reports are mobile-only (the default for most agencies in 2026), you're underselling exposure for e-commerce clients. Run both, and lead with the desktop screenshots when the buying journey obviously starts on desktop (high-AOV products, B2B SaaS, considered electronics).

04 · The citation leaderboard

Google itself is the most-cited source

When we ran the citation analysis for Accounting, ATO.gov.au led the leaderboard. For e-commerce, the leader is Google. Across 34,357 AIO citations on Australian e-commerce queries, 13.9% point to google.com itself: Shopping listings, product result pages, structured-data callouts. The AI is citing Google's own product surfaces.

The structural picture is rough for independent e-commerce operators. The top three sources Google's AI draws from (Google itself, Reddit, Amazon.com.au) are not domains a mid- sized Australian e-commerce business can compete with for citation. Wikipedia and Facebook fill out the structural layer. Together those five sources account for nearly 18% of all e-commerce AIO citations.

What still works: the Australian-specific retailers and content sites in the top 20 (Australianmade, The Iconic, Princess Polly) all have one thing in common: they're niche-authoritative inside their category. The path to citation isn't broad SEO authority. It's category dominance with strong AU-domain signals.

Reddit is the second-highest non-Google source (729 citations), continuing the pattern we've seen across every vertical. r/AusFinance, r/BuyItForLife, and category-specific subreddits (r/Coffee, r/SkincareAddictionAU, r/AustralianGardening) routinely surface inside e-commerce AIO blocks. The Reddit data partnership Google announced in 2024 is fully operational in AU SERPs now.

Wider context: 58.8% of all AIO citations on e-commerce queries are Australian domains. Above the dataset average (54.9%) but well below high-AU verticals like Accounting (72.6%) or Real Estate (69.1%). E-commerce sits in the middle band, where international comparison content (US review sites, global manufacturer pages) competes evenly with AU retailers for citation slots.

05 · Local intent

Adding "Australia" makes things worse, not better

This is the section where e-commerce diverges most sharply from every other industry. Across every other vertical we measured, adding a suburb, city, or "near me" qualifier to a query reduces AIO trigger by 10 to 37 percentage points. E-commerce inverts.

Add "Australia", "AU", a state, or a city qualifier to an e-commerce query and AIO trigger jumps from 39.9% to 57.5%. That's a 17.6 percentage-point increase, in the opposite direction to every other industry in this study.

Our reading: "local intent" in e-commerce doesn't mean "shop near me". It means "buy from an Australian seller". Queries like "best mattress Australia", "running shoes AU shipping", "Dyson V15 Australia" are comparative, decision-time queries. They sound transactional, but they're asking Google to write a buyer's guide. So the AI obliges.

Translation for your store: if you've been following the standard local-SEO advice and adding "Australia" or city names to your product page titles to boost AU visibility, you're optimising for higher AIO exposure, not lower. The opposite of the playbook for service businesses. Re-think product page title structure with this in mind.

06 · Page-type safety map

Even homepages and product pages aren't safe

We measured AIO trigger rate by what kind of page ranks #1 in the e-commerce SERP. The pattern is sharper than most verticals in two ways: the blog/content number is even higher, and the "safe" page types have lost most of their insulation.

When an e-commerce blog post ranks #1 for a query, AIO appears 90.2% of the time. That's effectively the ceiling. Almost every "best X 2026", "X buying guide", "X vs Y" article ranking for an Australian e-commerce query now has an AI Overview sitting above it.

What's worse for e-commerce: the surfaces that normally insulate a brand (homepage, product page) have lost most of their protection. Homepages rank-trigger AIO 45.8% of the time (compare to Accounting's 18.6%). Product pages trigger 48.8%. Even your most defensive SEO assets are now AI-mediated on roughly half their #1-ranking impressions.

Our view: the page-type safety map for e-commerce is the flattest in the dataset. Where most industries can lean on at least one safe surface (homepage, location page, service page), e-commerce has no genuinely safe page type. Plan for click-through compression across every template you operate.

07 · What to do about it

Five actions we'd take if we ran an Australian e-commerce business

1. Treat commercial intent as the new battleground. "Best X" content and comparison guides are where AIO eats hardest (68.1% trigger). Either own that content with strong primary research (head-to-head testing, structured comparison tables, expert reviewers with verifiable credentials), or shift your content investment toward brand-led commercial queries ("[your brand] [product] review", "[your brand] sizing guide") where you're already the default citation.
2. Get on Reddit. Specifically, category subreddits. 729 e-commerce AIO citations point to Reddit, our #2 source after Google itself. r/BuyItForLife for durability queries, r/AusFinance for value-for-money queries, and category-specific Australian subs (r/AustralianGardening, r/SkincareAddictionAU, r/CoffeeAU) for product recommendations. A subject-matter expert from your team answering questions there is the most cost-effective citation play in this vertical.
3. Stop optimising for "Australia" qualifiers. Adding location tokens to e-commerce queries INCREASES AIO exposure (+17.6pp), inverting the playbook every other industry follows. If your product page titles have been "Buy X in Australia", consider removing the geographic token. You're optimising for higher AI mediation.
4. Build brand demand as the moat. Navigational intent (brand queries) is the only intent class where AIO is genuinely scarce (25.6%). Above-the-line brand investment, repeat-customer retention, and direct-to- consumer email lists deliver disproportionate value now, because they generate the only query type the AI doesn't mediate.
5. Audit both mobile AND desktop. E-commerce is the rare vertical where desktop AIO is HIGHER (+1.8pp). Most agencies skip desktop reports. For e-commerce clients, run both, and pay particular attention to desktop research-stage queries are now AI-mediated at the highest rate in the dataset.