> When The Wall Street Journal contacted Google in June, a spokesman at the internet giant, after a few days of digging, provided an update: The mystery shopper is a bot of its own creation.

> The purpose: making sure the all-in price for the product, including tax and shipping, matches the listing on its Google Shopping platform or in advertisements. It wasn’t to cause angst to merchants due to thousands of abandoned carts.

> “We use automated systems to ensure consumers are getting accurate pricing information from our merchants,” a company spokesman said. “This sometimes leads to merchants seeing abandoned carts as a result of our system testing whether the price displayed matches the price at checkout.”

You'd think they could have better identified themselves in accounts they were creating rather than creating this mysterious "John Smith" persona. Maybe "GoogleBot PriceVerifier" would have been a better choice.

edit: remove my inaccurate confusion about something, and fix quotes that I'd copied from a plagiarized version of the article.