Search is changing, but not all these changes are for the better. Over-focusing on these differences may fail to address the long term goals and what ultimately will be successful.
This maps almost exactly onto what we see in commercial/retail queries specifically: products surfaced in AI Overviews often diverge meaningfully from what ranks in the Shopping tab, because one leans on a much looser retrieval layer while the other is grounded in the structured product graph. For merchants that means optimizing for two systems that don't share a quality bar, let alone a ranking logic. The gap you're describing isn't something retailers can just wait out either, since Google has every incentive to keep monetizing the SERP long after the AI answer box is "good enough."
This maps almost exactly onto what we see in commercial/retail queries specifically: products surfaced in AI Overviews often diverge meaningfully from what ranks in the Shopping tab, because one leans on a much looser retrieval layer while the other is grounded in the structured product graph. For merchants that means optimizing for two systems that don't share a quality bar, let alone a ranking logic. The gap you're describing isn't something retailers can just wait out either, since Google has every incentive to keep monetizing the SERP long after the AI answer box is "good enough."