YouTube News
YouTube expanded Ask YouTube into shopping
Product searches can surface comparison tables and follow-up questions on the watch page, YouTube said Wednesday.
YouTube said its conversational search tool Ask YouTube will act as a shopping companion, unveiling the shift at Made on YouTube on Wednesday.
Ask YouTube started as an experiment in natural-language search and now returns mixes of Shorts and long-form clips for complex prompts, from travel itineraries to skill guides. YouTube said the next layer targets purchase decisions: organized product recommendations, attribute comparison tables tuned to stated preferences, and follow-up questions users can ask without leaving a video’s watch page.
YouTube pointed to viewers already using creator reviews and recommendations as a learning path before buying. More than 140 million people used Ask YouTube in June to go deeper on videos, up more than 500 percent since December, the platform said.
Emily Moxley, YouTube’s vice president of product management for viewer AI, said a custom Gemini model matches complex viewer questions to the exact timestamp where a video answers them. YouTube framed that mapping as a way to connect passive searchers directly to creators’ product guidance.