Summary
Often, when buying something online, it’s a process that comes with a few previous steps, including seeing whether the site you’re buying from is reputable. Now, Chrome wants to help you with that so you don’t have to hop around different searches and websites.
Chrome has just announced a new feature that will let you vet the legitimacy of online storefronts you visit before buying from them. The feature uses AI (it might be one of the most useful uses of AI I’ve seen pop up lately) to put together user feedback and give you a summary, right from your address bar, on whether a website is actually legit or a scam. This functionality is powered by data aggregated from Google’s own Shopping platform as well as other prominent third-party review websites—it tries to give you a more holistic and balanced consensus by aggregating multiple sources, reducing your risk of being swayed by a small number of either fake positive reviews or unrepresentative negative feedback. Third-party sources include TrustPilot and ScamAdvisor, among others.
The feature is activated by clicking an icon located to the left of the website address in Chrome’s omnibox. This action will open a panel containing an AI-generated summary of reviews for the site being visited. It gives you a summarized “what customers say” section that tries to give you a very brief summary of the website’s reviews, as well as an option to see reviews elsewhere in case you want to give them a deeper look.
The purpose of this feature is pretty straightforward. These days, anyone with $10 to buy a domain and $20 for a Shopify license can set up an online storefront, and there’s a ton of dropshipping websites with insane markups as well as straight up scams—a website can charge your credit card, but it doesn’t mean it will ship an item out to you. If people have said stuff about it online, you can easily see it right from your browser. If there’s good feedback, you can proceed with your purchase, and if there’s bad feedback (or if there’s no feedback), you might want to skip it and buy somewhere else.
The effectiveness and fairness of the AI summaries will depend heavily on how Google’s algorithms weigh different data sources, interpret sentiment, and handle conflicting information, so you might still want to search for reviews anyway. It’s a good, and extremely useful, starting point, though.
Right now, this feature is confirmed to roll out in the US. We don’t know if Google is planning to add this to more countries sooner or later.
