Amazon is testing a shopping experience where it will serve up select products in its search results even if it does not sell them in its marketplace, and link to the brand’s website to make it easy for customers to purchase them there.

"These items will show up alongside the hundreds of millions of products sold directly on Amazon," the company explains in a blog post.

Customers can click on the link and go to the brand’s website to evaluate the product, see pricing and delivery options, and make purchases directly from that brand's site.

Product locations in nearby stores is a missing piece for Amazon that Google capitalizes on in a tag that lets consumers know the product is “In stores nearby.”

Rajiv Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of search and conversational shopping, wrote in the post that the idea is to bring more of a selection to the platform to improve the shopping experience. 

This experience is live for a small set of U.S. customers in the Amazon Shopping app on both iOS and Android. It will roll out to more U.S. customers and incorporate more brands based on feedback.

BrightEdge has pointed to a pattern of people using multiple sites to search for items in specific categories. And it is causing “search fragmentation" during the past year, writes Greg Sterling, co-founder at Near Media. Companies supporting social and AI have “peeled away users from Google.

As Sterling points out, “patterns of people using multiple sites to search and make buying decisions goes much further back.”

He writes that years ago Amazon became the dominant "starting point" for product search, despite Google trying to “claw its way back using a variety of strategies and has devoted more effort and resources to improving and showcasing product search, whose results often look very different than traditional” search engine results pages.

Research firm CIRP reports that Amazon has grown its product search lead from 82% to 90% during the past 10 years, despite a majority of U.S. households subscribing to Amazon Prime.

Amazon Rufus, the company's generative AI shopping assistant, could also help to improve the shopping expeirence by finding products off the marketplace, but a company spokesperson said the service is not available.