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Gemini's floating overlay may soon help you 'Shop this' right from your screen
Oct 12, 2026 — 2:40 PM ET
- Google is working on a new “Shop this” suggestion for Gemini’s pop-up overlay.
- The tool would recognize products, summarizing selling points, and even offer comparisons.
- Compared to existing Gemini retail tools, this one would let users easily look up products across the apps they use.
Trying to get info about products you stumble across online used to involve a little bit of legwork. If you weren’t lucky enough to find a good link, or even a mention of the product name, you still might be able to turn to Google Lens for help. Gemini has only made that even easier, with automatic screen context letting us quickly dig into all manner of content. Today we’re checking out early evidence of work towards enhancing that experience with some new shopping tools.
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One of of our favorite Gemini superpowers is using the AI to really break down the differences between products through its shopping comparisons. And now it looks like Google’s only trying to find more ways for us to use Gemini for some retail therapy, as the company preps a new “Shop this” suggestion for the Gemini overlay.
Looking through version 17.66.11.sa.arm64 of the Google app for Android, we’ve identified the presence of some new text strings:
<string name="assistant_floaty_screen_context_shopping_shop_this_title">Shop this</string>
<string name="assistant_floaty_screen_context_shopping_shop_this_query">"Identify this product and where to buy it. Give me a quick summary of what it's built for, a practical comparison of its key sizes or variants, and show similar products in slightly different styles to help me explore my options"</string>In addition to that clear mention of screen context, “floaty” here is a reference to the UI you see when pulling Gemini up on top of another app — cute, right?
So far, we’ve yet to convince Gemini to give us an early look at this mode in action, but the text there still manages to do a nice job at providing us with an overview of what to expect: product identification, use summaries, spec comparisons, and suggestions for similar products.
Granted, none of that’s really game-changing for Gemini, and all this stems from its existing bag of retail tricks. Mainly, “Shop this” appears to be a convenient way to access this type of analysis, requiring minimal interaction in order to get started.
Right now, this is still all in development, and we don’t yet know the full scope of how it may operate — for instance, if that may only be with specific apps. We’ll keep on eye out for any future signs of progress, and hopefully get a chance to show you what it looks like in action.
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