AI Price Comparison
Traditional comparison sites list what merchants send them. This searches for what is actually being sold, then does the work of making the prices comparable.
Feeds versus searching
Most price comparison sites are built on merchant feeds: a shop submits a file of products and prices, and the site displays it. That model is fast and has two structural holes — a shop that has not signed up is invisible no matter how cheap it is, and the listing is only as current as the last upload.
Searching instead of ingesting inverts both. Coverage is whoever is selling the thing, and freshness is the moment the page was read. The cost is that every search is real work rather than a database lookup, which is why results take seconds rather than milliseconds.
Making prices comparable
Two prices can only be compared once they describe the same thing. Shops publish the same item under different names, with different capitalisation, bundled accessories and regional suffixes, so listings are matched into a single product before any comparison happens. Manufacturer identifiers are used where a shop publishes them, and the title and attributes carry it where none exist.
Currency is the second half of the problem. Where a shop prices in a currency other than the one you are shopping in, the figure is restated so the comparison means something — and the offer is marked as converted, because the shop will still charge in its own currency.
What is compared
Price plus shipping, as one landed total, against a merchant trust score weighted by review volume. Delivery estimates and stock status are carried alongside so a cheap offer that arrives in three weeks is visibly that.
Nothing is paid placement. Ordering is computed from the offers themselves, and no merchant can buy a position in it.
Try it on something you are buying
Describe it the way you would to a person. This one is ready to run:
Search “espresso machine with built-in grinder”Common questions
- How is this different from Google Shopping or a traditional comparison site?
- Those largely display merchant-submitted feeds. This searches the open web at query time and reads the shops' own pages, so it can surface a seller who never submitted a feed, and the price reflects when the page was read rather than when a file was uploaded.
- Do merchants pay to appear or to rank higher?
- No. Ranking is computed from the landed total and the merchant's trust score. Some outbound links may carry an affiliate tag, which is disclosed above every list of offers and never affects the ordering.
- How do you know two listings are the same product?
- Manufacturer identifiers where a shop publishes them, and the product title and attributes where it does not. Where a match cannot be made confidently, the listings stay separate — a wrong merge would compare the price of one thing against the price of another.
- Are the prices inclusive of tax and shipping?
- Shipping is included in the landed total wherever the merchant publishes it. Tax follows what the shop displays for your market, so a price shown tax-inclusive stays that way — and the merchant's own page is the final word before you pay.