Google recently added Google Lens powered image search to Chrome for Android. You can long-press any image and select “Search with Google Lens”. A code commit that I spotted today talks about adding a “shopping intent” to this.

Shopping Intent for Google Lens

The commit log simply says “initial draft for lens shopping experiments”. However, if you look at the code change, you’ll see an experimental flag for this feature.

Flag name: Google Lens powered image search for shoppable images in the context menu.

Description: Replaces default search image with google lens with a shopping intent to Google Lens when supported.

The code is added only to the Android version of Chrome at the moment. Now, how will this work? Here is what I think.

You will long-press an image and select “Search with Google Lens. The AI that powers Lens will look at the image and give you information or additional actions as it does now. If the image that you are looking at is a product, you will see an additional option to buy this product.

For example, if you are scanning an image with Google Lens and the image has a bag, you might see links to purchase the same bag online.

It might take a while for us to test this and see the exact workflow. We will hopefully see this in the Canary version of Chrome pretty soon. Stay tuned for more updates on this.