If you’ve searched for almost any product on Google recently, you’ve seen how much the results page has changed.

Product packs and scrollable carousels of individual listings now appear multiple times on a single results page.

We’re constantly evaluating data to understand how to scale ecommerce visibility.

We’ve tracked searches that returned 60 individual organic product listings on a single page. These are premium placements — and for a growing share of commercial searches, they’re where the purchase journey begins.

This shift is happening gradually enough that many brands haven’t fully recalibrated their strategy around it.

The data suggests it’s worth revisiting. The traffic opportunity in product packs is significant, competition is already intense, and the brands winning today are doing a few specific things differently.

With help from Nozzle, we analyzed data from more than 63,000 merchants across a broad set of ecommerce keywords from January 2025 through January 2026. Here’s what stood out.

Defining success: Appearances vs. actual traffic

Appearing in product packs and actually winning traffic from them are two different things, and the gap can be surprisingly large, the data reveals.

• eBay appears in product results for 874,621 keywords in this dataset.
• Home Depot appears for 831,699, a comparable footprint.

But the estimated traffic from those appearances is dramatically different:

• eBay drives about 3.2 million visits from product pack results.
• Home Depot drives nearly 28.8 million from a slightly smaller keyword footprint.

The difference comes down to position quality within the pack. Home Depot’s products consistently appear in visible, above-the-fold positions where shoppers actually see and click them.

For eBay, many long-tail marketplace terms drive a smaller overall impact. Product packs are a critical tool for Google to drive awareness for common products and goods, often tied to head terms. Brands competing in product packs need to understand how Google uses them to drive clear purchase decisions for everyday products.

• For marketers: When reviewing product pack performance, it’s critical to segment your data. Prioritizing categories with higher search volume and demand is essential for improving performance within product packs. That distinction gives you a much clearer view of where the real opportunity exists.

The critical gap: Distinguishing product pack visibility  

Product carousels scroll horizontally, so the first slots get far more exposure than listings hidden further back. That makes the distinction between visible and non-visible appearances a critical metric for understanding true reach.

Analysis of major retailers highlights this disparity:

• REI has 3.8 million products, yet 1.52 million of its appearances require scrolling to be seen.
• Walmart similarly holds 1.29 million non-visible placements despite having 3.5 million unique products. 

Even for industry leaders, aggregate numbers can mask how much of their presence is effectively out of reach for Google shoppers. Analyzing that split is the clearest way to identify where improvements in product data and feed optimization will drive the greatest returns.

Product carousels often require horizontal scrolling to display all products. Listings that appear in the most visible positions without scrolling receive significantly more exposure than those placed further back in the carousel.

Understanding the split between visible and non-visible appearances is one of the clearest ways to identify where feed optimization and product data improvements will have the greatest impact.

• For CMOs: If your team reports total product pack appearances as a success metric, it’s worth asking what percentage of those appearances are actually visible. That ratio is a more accurate reflection of the channel’s contribution to your business.

Does discounting drive product pack visibility?

A common hypothesis is that discounted products send stronger pricing signals, and that stronger pricing signals should earn better placement in Google’s product packs. However, data across the top 10 merchants doesn’t show a clear relationship between the two.

• Amazon.com leads all merchants, with 49% of its catalog discounted. Its visibility rate of 72% is strong, but it ranks in the middle of the pack.
• eBay takes the opposite approach: just 8% of its products are discounted, yet it ties for the highest visibility rate in the dataset at 81%.
• Walmart Seller discounts only 24% of its catalog and also reaches 81% visibility. Meanwhile, Walmart discounts 27% of products but ranks near the bottom in visibility at 62%.

The pattern simply doesn’t hold consistently in either direction. Merchants with high discount rates aren’t consistently more visible, and merchants with low discount rates aren’t consistently penalized.

This tells us that discounting is likely one signal among many. It matters at the margins, but it isn’t the mechanism that determines whether a product earns a visible placement in a product pack. Feed quality, category relevance, review signals, and image standards appear to carry significantly more weight.

• For retail teams: If your product pack strategy relies heavily on promotional pricing to win visibility, the data suggests those resources may be better spent elsewhere. Success in the current landscape depends on building presence where users make purchasing decisions and prioritizing strategic coverage over price reductions.

Specialist brands are competing with the giants and winning

One of the most encouraging findings in this data is that product pack success is not limited to the largest retailers. Specialist brands with focused category expertise are competing extremely well against much larger players.

• Camp Chef appears in product results for 155,299 keywords, a fraction of the footprint of Walmart or eBay. Yet Camp Chef generates an estimated 2.6 million visits from those appearances, with above-the-fold positioning that rivals Home Depot.
• Vertical ecommerce brands like Fellow are generating meaningful exposure as they expand into categories like high-end coffee makers, a key opportunity for brands using organic channels to drive growth.

• Fire Maple generates more than 1 million estimated visits from 185,184 keyword appearances.

These brands are winning meaningful traffic in product packs against retailers many times their size because product packs reward category relevance and feed quality, not just brand scale.

For brands that have historically felt outmatched by larger competitors in traditional SEO, product packs represent a real opportunity to compete on a more level playing field. Strong product data, competitive pricing, quality imagery, and strong reviews can outperform a much larger retailer for the keywords that matter most within a category.

• For agencies: This channel rewards focus and quality over scale. If a brand you support has real depth in a category, that expertise can translate directly into product pack performance in ways broader competitors struggle to match.

Product pack visibility shifts. Staying informed matters.

Looking at the full dataset, one pattern is consistent across nearly every merchant: product pack visibility shifts throughout the year.

Brands that held strong positions throughout parts of the year saw meaningful fluctuations as Google changed how product results surfaced. Some merchants grew steadily through midyear before pulling back in Q4. Others spiked during promotional periods before returning to baseline.

This is simply how the channel works. Feed quality, product availability, review volume, pricing, and image standards all influence product pack placement, and Google regularly updates how these results are surfaced.

The brands that respond most effectively are the ones with consistent visibility into performance, so they can spot changes early and act before those shifts impact revenue.

Future Google I/O announcements and the deeper integration of AI through models like Gemini 3 will fundamentally reshape product packs through the rise of agentic commerce and the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).

In this environment, Google’s central challenge will be balancing paid and organic visibility. The shift is already creating a two-tiered search economy where citation in AI Overviews is becoming critical for brand recognition, influencing both organic and paid product pack performance.

The bigger picture

Google’s product packs have evolved from a supplementary feature into a primary purchase touchpoint for commercial searches.

The Nozzle data in this analysis, covering more than 63,000 merchants, makes it clear that competition for this space is already intense. The leaders are pulling ahead, and the gap between brands paying close attention and those that are not is already measurable in traffic and revenue.

The good news is that the fundamentals of winning in this channel are within reach for most brands: strong product data, smart pricing strategy, quality creative, and consistent monitoring.

None of that requires a massive budget. It requires focus, the right tools, and the right questions at the right level of the organization.