The Challenge: SERP landscape for ecom is shifting
The search results in ecommerce are changing fast and winning visibility is more competitive than ever. For large ecommerce companies managing thousands of products, one feature of Google’s search engine results pages that seems here to stay is “Merchant Listings.” Product grids now dominate above-the-fold real estate. In many cases, the search results look more like a product listings page (PLP) than a traditional search results page.
These product grids are surfacing for queries that would historically often result in a PLP ranking, making a once-transparent channel feel less visible and harder to measure.
Without clarity on what drives visibility and engagement in organic product grids, changes to the product feed or on-page metadata or schema risk hurting performance in Google Merchant Listings.
Any tweak to the feed, on-page metadata, or schema could shift your rankings in these high value modules. This creates a "Jenga tower" mentality for many SEO teams, where they treat changes with extreme caution. The only way to maintain control, learn, and avoid losing ground is through experimentation.
The Solution: Testing with SearchPilot
With SearchPilot, whether testing changes to the feed or on-page, we can conduct experiments designed to measure the impact on all Google organic sessions as well as just the clicks and impressions coming from Google product grids.
This means you can shift from a reactive mindset of hoping and guessing to a control mode where you are testing and measuring outcomes.
Multi-metric test analysis showing a test that is inconclusive on total organic sessions, but positive on Google Merchant Center impressions and clicks
And GMC impressions are not like traditional impressions in blue-link search results. They only count when a searcher actively clicks open the product listings module. This makes GMC impressions a much stronger signal of genuine shopping intent, showing not just if you appeared, but whether customers chose to engage with your products. In the screenshot below, an impression would be triggered for the retailers appearing in the pop-up detail panel on the right:
For leadership and stakeholders, learning through testing and being able to tell a story with this data shifts the conversation from “are we getting traffic” to “are we winning the new SERP features that drive qualified traffic?”
