Chrome is going to use AI to help you compare products from across your tabs

Google wants to help ease the pain of comparison shopping across multiple tabs in Chrome with a new AI-powered tool that can summarize your tabs into one page.

The tool, which Google is calling “tab compare,” will use generative AI to pull product data from tabs you have open and collect it all into one table. Assuming it works and pulls accurate information, the tool seems like it could be a handy way to look at a number of different products in one unified view.

But while it’s potentially useful, the tool could also take away traffic from sites that collect and compare product information — which might be especially worrying for independent publishers that are already struggling to be seen on Google. I’m also skeptical that Google will correctly pull all of the finer details about various products into the tables it creates with tab compare. I don’t always trust Google’s accuracy right now!

There are some limits on what tab compare can do. The tables it creates are limited to 10 items because “we’ve just found the column layout doesn’t scale very well beyond that,” Google spokesperson Joshua Cruz tells The Verge. I also didn’t get a super clear answer when I asked what specific attributes the feature might look for to pull into a table. “It depends on the category,” according to Cruz. “We’ll automatically try to identify the most salient attributes depending on the product category.”

And right now, the tool is limited to shopping — but it seems like Google is thinking about the obvious next step of allowing it to compare other types of information. In a briefing with reporters, Chrome VP Parisa Tabriz said she could imagine being able to use the tool to compare travel information or details about universities. “I’m excited about how this could evolve to being a tool to help for all kinds of comparisons,” Tabriz said.

Tab compare will launch in the US on Chrome for desktop in the “next few weeks,” Tabriz wrote in a blog post. Google has also announced some other AI-powered features for Chrome, including a Circle to Search-like feature.