Driving shoppers naturally from keywords to real intent

AI Overview gives shoppers a concise, AI-powered, human-like summary of what they’re looking for and the products that best match their shopping intent. Instead of showing a static grid of product cards, the AI Overview provides instant context and highlights key products. It offers shoppers a more enjoyable and guided way to explore the commerce store catalog, as the most relevant products are surfaced automatically.

Positioned between the search box and the search engine results grid (SERP), the AI Overview serves your shoppers as a guidance layer, providing immediate shopping context and shaping the search journey toward discovery, while giving you a way to conversion by influencing effective product catalog discovery.

As search behavior evolves, shoppers now expect search engines to understand their intent and deliver more relevant results, whether they use simple keyword queries or more detailed questions that don’t match your catalog terms. In a traditional search experience, shoppers often end up frustrated, scrolling through lengthy catalogs and applying multiple filters, or reaching a dead end with no results. A query like “engagement ring” or “I'm looking for a engagement ring that will make my proposal unforgettable” may display all products in your catalog under the “ring” tag, or even return no results if no product carries that exact label. The AI Overview transforms search queries into shopping intents that closely match your product catalog, delivering a conversational-like search experience that surfaces products that wouldn’t be shown otherwise, potentially boosting conversions.

AI Overview is triggered only for queries containing two or more keywords. This ensures the system has sufficient context to interpret shopper intent and generate a meaningful, conversational summary.

Summary, product discovery, and action

The AI Overview combines context summary, guidance, and actionable product discovery in an engaging and enjoyable manner. Shoppers can move seamlessly from query to purchase through a natural, conversational flow. The way different products appear and how one product would lead to another without even typing makes shoppers enjoy the search experience and feel like they’re effortlessly discovering products. At the same time, you gain confidence that the right products in your catalog are being shown at the right moment:

• Understand shoppers’ intent and preferences through a natural conversation.
  The AI Overview provides a concise, natural-language summary that captures your shopper’s intent in real time. Key products stand out immediately above the results, helping shoppers understand their options without needing to scroll or guess, and making product discovery fast and intuitive.

• Dive straight into relevant products.
  Expanding the AI Overview reveals AI-curated product carousels tailored to the query intent, allowing shoppers to explore relevant products without leaving the overview. Carousel titles can be clicked to refine the search and update results instantly.

• Fewer steps to purchase.
  The AI Overview reduces friction between discovery and checkout, trimming unnecessary scrolling and streamlining the path to purchase. Product cards can be clicked to view product details, like a traditional product card result.

Turning keywords into intent in online grocery shopping

See how AI Overview transforms broad and plain searches into human-like guidance

Filtering and refined intent

The AI Overview dynamically adapts to any query refinement the shopper applies during the search. When facets and filters are selected, such as material, price range, or style, the AI Overview service relaunches the generation process, taking the new context into account. The selected facets and filters become part of the interpreted intent, allowing the system to refine both the natural-language summary and the AI-curated product carousels accordingly.

For example, after searching for “engagement ring”, if the shopper filters by white gold and under €1,000, the AI Overview automatically updates to reflect the new intent: “Looking for a white gold engagement ring within your budget?” Here's a selection of elegant white gold engagement rings designed to suit your style and price range.

This adaptive behavior ensures the AI Overview remains relevant throughout the shopper's search journey, offering an experience that continuously aligns with intent as filters evolve the search.

AI privacy matters

Trust and transparency are at the core of Empathy Platform’s approach to AI. The AI Overview feature runs exclusively on a private cloud powered by Empathy AI, with on-premise AI rack servers located in Empathy.co’s headquarters.

Empathy Platform’s responsible, privacy-first approach ensures that:

• No shopper data is ever shared externally.
• No queries or shoppers’ interactions are used to train models.
• No data can be used to feed third-party or competitor AI systems.

By keeping the Empathy Platform AI infrastructure private and dedicated, you can enjoy the benefits of advanced AI-powered search experiences in your commerce store without sacrificing shopper privacy or brand data security.

Full data governance

All Empathy Platform AI features, including the AI Overview, are built on principles of trust, transparency, and ethics, ensuring you keep complete control over your data.

Try AI Overview to...

• Transform keyword-based queries into natural, human-like search experiences.
• Bridge the gap between traditional keyword search and AI-driven, contextual discovery that reflects the real search intent.
• Help shoppers understand instantly product options in your catalog with concise query context summaries.
• Let shoppers interact with search in a natural, conversational way, guiding them effortlessly through product discovery by surfacing AI-curated product carousels that reflect their real shopping intent.
• Link the right products to the right shoppers just at the right time.
• Retain engagement in low or no-results scenarios with meaningful alternatives.
• Empower shoppers to explore and refine their search naturally, without needing perfect or catalog terms.
• Streamline the shopping journey by shortening the path from search and discovery to checkout.

Spot the difference

Both AI Overview and Related Prompts share the same underlying technology that interprets shopper intent and generates meaningful, natural-language suggestions. However, they serve different purposes and are activated in different moments of the search journey: Related Prompts are designed to suggest follow-up queries or complementary intents, inviting shoppers to continue their discovery journey with alternative searches. Instead, the AI Overview focuses on summarizing the current search context and surfacing relevant products in a guided, conversational way.

The AI Overview acts as a real-time layer of understanding that’s dynamically generated at search time. It transforms the shopper’s query into a related prompt, summarizing the shopper's intent in natural language and surfacing immediately relevant product carousels above the results grid. This helps shoppers grasp their options at a glance and interact with the catalog without leaving the search flow. Unlike Related Prompts, you can’t curate AI Overview’s content, as it’s entirely driven at the moment of search.

Note that Related Prompts can be generated at both index time and search time, offering merchants more control over their configuration. They can be curated and strategically placed to support specific intents, campaigns, or discovery goals.

UX behavior also makes a difference

In the interface, these two features also behave differently: The AI Overview always appears above the product results grid, providing a top-level summary of intent, while Related Prompts are displayed as tags or product carousels within the results set or act as a fallback when there are low or no results, but only if AI Overview is inactive or has no generated content.

Together, these features enhance the search experience from different angles: AI Overview gives context and clarity in the moment, while Related Prompts encourage continued exploration and discovery, ensuring shoppers always have a meaningful next step.

The inner workings of AI Overview

The AI Overview builds on the same Empathy AI foundations that power Related Prompts, combining real-time intent understanding with collective behavioral intelligence to generate meaningful summaries and AI-curated product selections at the moment of search.

Trigger threshold

The AI Overview generation is triggered only for queries containing two or more keywords, allowing the system to reliably capture intent and produce accurate summaries and product carousels.

The Overview service is responsible for generating the AI Overview output, which consists of a summary (equivalent to the question element in the Related Prompts context) that reinforces the shopper’s search intent, and the product carousels triggered by the detected domain entities.

When a query is launched, the Overview service works with the Empathy AI Router, which interprets the query’s intent by extracting its context, commerce store domain, taxonomy, and other relevant attributes. This contextual understanding defines the framework generating the AI Overview.

To enrich the process, the service also draws on the wisdom of the crowd, a layer of intelligence that captures aggregated, anonymized signals from collective shopper behavior. These insights help shape the contextual understanding, ensuring the generated summary and product carousels reflect real shopping patterns and not just semantic meaning.

The extracted and enriched context is then used to render a master prompt, guiding the large language model in producing a concise, natural-language summary of the shopper’s intent. The system then retrieves the most relevant product results from the catalog, structuring them into AI-generated carousels based on the detected intent and product domain entities.

Finally, the resulting overview and its product carousels are displayed in the commerce store interface through the Beacon microservice, creating a cohesive, human-like search experience that connects understanding with product discovery.