Lots of eCommerce brands I speak with right now are seeing the same thing; that organic traffic to many of their category pages is down... even when sitewide traffic isn't.

Yesterday at The eCommerce SEO Summit, I presented a session on 'The State of eCommerce Search' and hosted a panel discussion, too.

In todays issue, I wanted to share some thoughts about what's actually taking away clicks from category pages... I shared insights into this in my session and it came up a few times in the panel.

87% of eCommerce SERPs now contain 'popular products' grids.

Organic traffic to category and collection pages is down because of the rise in visibility and occurrence of merchant listing grids - e.g. popular products.

These...

I recently analysed 2,000 eCommerce SERPs and found that these grids now show on 87% of these.

And in many cases, they're showing above the traditional position 1 result.

The highest number of product grid spots I saw when running this research?

30

There's two things to consider here:

1. If you're not visible within these merchant listings, your competitors are. They're an additional opportunity for those who rank prominently in the traditional results to earn more visibility, as well as an opportunity for those that don't to drive traffic from these searches.
   ​
   I'll talk more about how to get featured in these, and some of the common reasons that prevent retailers from showing, in a future issue.
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2. That #1 ranking that now has a two row product grid above it? The CTR has dropped off...
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   You can retain that same ranking you held before a merchant grid showed, but the clicks that go to that page will be lower; which is another reason why you need to be in the grid to maximise the traffic you get from those searches.

As we head into 2026, feeding Google's Shopping Graph with up-to-date and information-rich product data is going to remain one of the highest priorities for eCommerce brands.

But it's not just for Merchant Listing visibility. Just last week, Google announced a wealth of new features and upgrades for AI-powered shopping.

You can read about it here.

They're only in the US right now, but there's a common trend ... Google's Shopping Graph.

As we move through this new era of search, it's becoming more apparent than ever that this is going to be a big deal for eCommerce brands across multiple surfaces.

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If you learned something from this issue or it’s made you think about SEO a little differently, please consider forwarding it to someone else on your team.

I’m on a mission to make sure more SEO investment actually has an impact on real business metrics.

Appreciate you making it to the end; same time next week?

- James Brockbank

P.S. If you ever need expert support with SEO or digital PR and want to drive results that actually matter, I’d love to chat. Let’s talk.

✍️ From the Loft... Fresh from our side of the web; here’s a few things me and other Lofties put out into the world this week. ​ ​Inside Zero Click London: Key takeaways for navigating AI-driven search - Liv Day, Digitaloft

📌 This week’s bookmarks: If I could only send three links to a fellow marketer this week, it’d be these… ​ ​Introducing the branded queries filter in Search Console - Google Search Central Blog ​Beyond Sessions: Which LLMs Send Highly Engaged Traffic? - Marianna Mankle, Siege Media ​AI SEO Deep Dive – Tom Critchlow & Dan Petrovic - Dejan

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👋 Hi, I'm James... Managing Director & Founder at Digitaloft. I've spent the last 10 years building an agency that's perfectly positioned to help ambitious brands to drive real business growth from SEO and digital PR. You might have seen me speaking at events like BrightonSEO, SMX and the International Search Summit.

Digitaloft, Angel Yard, 21-23 Highgate, Kendal, LA9 4DY
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