Following Google’s Shopping move from free to paid there has been a huge drop in the number of shopping results that are shown up in the organic/universal listings within Google.com
- Example of universal search
Searchmetrics produced a report showing that in January 2012 shopping results appeared in 20% of universal search integrations, however by December this number had fallen to just 5%.
The steepest decline occurred in October, which is also the month that Google made the switch to a paid-for model.
In comparison images that show in universal search remained constant at around 30%, though video results also declined from 76% to 62%
Google consistently accounted for more than 50% of the shopping integrations during 2012, with Amazon its closest competitor with around 10% market share.
