Google ShoppingCopied

Google Shopping does not get much attention as a brand. As 9to5Google's Abner Li noted, it lives closely alongside Search, reachable through the Shopping filter and google.com/shopping, and Google deprecated its Android and iOS apps in 2021. So the logo change arrived the way many Google changes do: spotted before it was announced.

On 5 October 2024 Li reported a promo in the Discover feed carrying a new icon. The old logo was a price tag roughly divided into four quadrants of red, blue, green and yellow, with a white hole for a string and a white Google G. The new one is a shopping bag in the four colours, swirling together around a white, hollow centre, with a handle floating above and a wordmark matching a website redesign that was being tested. When the redesign launched on 15 October, 9to5Google confirmed the detail that gives the mark its meaning: the blank centre is cut out in the shape of a rotated Gemini sparkle.

That detail is the brief. Google's announcement to merchants described the new Google Shopping as a visually rich, personalised experience with larger product images, a year round deals page, and results researched with generative AI, rolling out in the US on desktop and mobile web. 9to5Google added that the Shopping Graph had been combined with Gemini models to power these experiences, and that the site featured background animation and new icons not seen in main Search.

The bag is a better symbol than the tag. A price tag says discount; a bag says shopping, and the swirl of colours is livelier than the old quadrants. The Gemini cutout is the cynical part. Pressing the AI brand into the negative space of an unrelated product icon turns a retail symbol into an advertisement for a model. It is clever at large sizes and illegible at favicon scale, where most people will meet it. Expect it to age as fast as the AI branding it borrows from. 9to5Google noted that the new site's delightful flourishes, as Li called them, briefly disappeared from view in Incognito before launch, a reminder that the brand was being tested in public before anyone explained it.