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Just when you thought your Gmail Promotions tab was a safe haven for discount codes, forgotten flight itineraries, and the occasional marketing love letter, Google has slipped in a new surprise. Enter shoppable ad tiles, now being tested in Gmail. They look like product cards, expand like mini catalogues, and promise to turn your email app into a full-blown discovery engine. Because why should Search, YouTube, and Discover have all the fun?
This new format quietly marries product discovery with performance marketing. The ad unit starts as a simple featured product tile; think brand image, title, maybe even a whisper of a deal. Tap it open and you’re face-to-face with a sleek carousel of goods. Price tags, star ratings, shipping tags and CTAs bundled into one inbox-friendly card. You don’t leave Gmail. You just scroll, evaluate, and potentially buy. It’s a clean little loop that collapses the classic marketing funnel into a single inbox tap.
From a consumer point of view, this is either the best thing to happen to shopping since next-day delivery, or another sign that your inbox is slowly becoming a mall with email attached. The good news: if the algorithm gets it right, these tiles could offer genuinely useful suggestions, right when you’re already in the decision-making zone. The slightly uncomfortable news: Gmail is now one more surface where your personal context feeds into performance ad placements. In other words, your inbox is officially part of Google’s Search, Stream, Scroll, Shop playbook.
To be fair, it’s a smart move from Google’s point of view. Shopping behaviour today doesn’t start with a clear “I want X” and end with a neat purchase. It’s fragmented. People discover products on Instagram, get targeted by a YouTube ad, read a blog post, click on a review site, and maybe three days later type something into Search. By then, half a dozen touchpoints have already shaped their intent. Gmail, used daily and passively by over 1.8 billion users, is just sitting there, full of signals and screen time. Why not make it shoppable?
In its Q2 2025 earnings call from earlier in the week, Alphabet reported $96.4 billion in total revenue, a 14 percent year-on-year jump, with $71.34 billion of that coming from advertising. Search accounted for a little over $54 billion, and YouTube’s ad business grew strongly as well, riding the wave of Shorts and brand integrations. Gmail didn’t get a special shoutout, but CEO Sundar Pichai did mention that AI-powered surfaces like Search Overviews, Discover and YouTube are now being layered with predictive commerce capabilities. It’s not hard to imagine Gmail joining that party.
Google has long been nudging Gmail’s Promotions tab into a more visual, curated space. Think of the recent cardstyle renderings of newsletters, deals, and brand messages. This new test just cranks the dial further, making Gmail feel less like an inbox and more like a personalised shopping stream. The unit is designed to look native and early experiments reportedly featured brands like iRobot and Wybot offering quick comparisons of vacuum cleaners and pool devices. Yes, the future is here, and it’s bringing robotic cleaning supplies to your inbox.
The bigger story is about compression. That trusty old marketing funnel of awareness, interest, consideration, intent, action isn’t just getting shorter. It’s getting folded. Google is now building ad formats that compress multiple funnel stages into a single surface, sometimes a single scroll. You’re not just seeing a brand. You’re evaluating it, comparing price points, reading reviews, and tapping on “Buy Now,” all without opening a new tab. It’s demand generation meets decision-making in real time. And increasingly, it's not happening on the open web. It’s happening inside Gmail, YouTube, Discover, and even Maps.
For advertisers, this is gold dust. You get reach, intent, context, and creative flexibility, and all of it on a channel that has long been considered less interactive. For brands running Demand Gen campaigns or retail media pushes, Gmail now becomes a direct response channel without the usual display ad fatigue. And if the product feed is synced properly, there’s room to test headlines, visuals, offers, and CTAs all in one scrollable card.
But there are lines that need to be watched. One is user experience. If these ads begin to feel intrusive, or blur the line too much between genuine promotional emails and paid inventory, backlash is inevitable. Gmail, unlike YouTube or Search, has historically been seen as a more personal space. An inbox, not a marketplace. That perception is part of its user trust. Google has said it is not scanning personal emails to power these ads—only using behavioural and logged-in signals from its wider ecosystem—but even so, user comfort will hinge on perception (see Airtel plus Perplexity's recent partnership). Labels matter. Relevance matters even more.
The other line is around mental load. As everything becomes a surface for commerce, some users may start to feel like there’s no escape. Every scroll is shoppable. Every tap is monetised. And while convenience is great, the fatigue from hyper-personalised, always-on selling can creep up quietly.
Still, this is the future. Your inbox isn’t sacred. It’s another surface. In a way, Gmail is simply catching up to what Google already perfected across Search, YouTube and Discover. This time, it just happens to be hiding behind your flight confirmation and a newsletter you forgot you subscribed to.
So the next time you open your Promotions tab, don’t be surprised if it looks a little more like Amazon and a little less like your newsletter graveyard. Inbox commerce has arrived and what you send sees how you shop.
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