Google Rolls Out Merchant Center AI Performance Insights

Google has made AI performance insights in Merchant Center available to retailers in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the US. The report shows how a brand and its products are being discovered in AI Mode and AI Overviews, including the brand’s share of voice against other brands.

Google announced the rollout on 16 September in a holiday shopping update from Ashish Gupta, vice president and general manager of merchant shopping. The same post introduced a Business Agent beta for YouTube ads and new checkout options for the Universal Commerce Protocol.

From Preview to General Availability

The Keyword covered the preview on 29 May, when Google said the report would reach these five markets “in the coming months” without giving a date. That article set out what the report contains. Four months later, Google says it is generally available in all five.

Google tied the release to the holiday season, the period when retailers have the most reason to know whether AI answers are recommending their products or a competitor’s.

What Retailers Can Measure

Share of voice is the central metric. It compares how often a retailer’s brand appears in AI shopping answers with how often competing brands appear, which gives merchants a benchmark on surfaces where there is no ranked list of results to check.

That gap is why the report matters. A retailer can see its position in a standard Shopping results page. In an AI Mode answer, the products named depend on how the model reads the query and the feed, and until now most merchants had no Google report showing how often they made the cut.

Google says the report also lets merchants act on what it shows to improve discoverability. In practice that points back to the product feed, which is what AI Mode draws on when it describes and recommends products.

Feed Changes Google Recommends

Alongside the rollout, Google set out feed practices for the holiday period. It recommends adding conversational attributes, which give a product listing richer context, so AI Mode has more detail to use when it recommends products in response to a question.

The video link attribute lets Google use a merchant’s product videos in shoppable ad formats automatically. Connecting loyalty data in Merchant Center shows member pricing and perks, such as free shipping, to signed-in members across Google. Google’s example is Minted, whose loyalty members see member pricing when they search for holiday cards.

Most of these are existing Merchant Center features. What is new is that Google now presents them as ways to improve visibility in AI answers, which gives retailers a reason to revisit feeds they originally set up for standard Shopping ads.

Part of a Wider Measurement Push

Google has been adding AI reporting across its tools. Search Console gained AI performance reports for website owners in June, covering how pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The Merchant Center report is the retail counterpart, measuring brands and products rather than pages.

For retailers, the two together mean AI visibility can now be tracked inside Google’s own tools rather than estimated through third-party trackers.