Merchant Center AI performance insights: live in five countries
On 16 September 2026 Google made AI performance insights generally available in Merchant Center for accounts in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the United States. The report shows how often your brand and products appear in AI Mode and AI Overviews for shopping queries, compared with competitors you define, for organic listings only. The same announcement opened a US beta of Business Agent for YouTube ads and expanded checkout integrations.
| Platform | Google Ads |
|---|---|
| Feature | Merchant Center AI performance insights |
| Announced | Sep 16, 2026 |
| Status | Available |
| Where available | Generally available from 16 September 2026 for Merchant Center accounts in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the United States, English-language queries only. |
| Who is affected | Retailers with a Merchant Center account in those five countries, and the Shopping and Performance Max campaigns that run on the same product data. |
| Action needed | Optional. Define your competitor set in the report, then fix product titles and attributes for top terms where few of your products show. Do not move paid budget on share of voice alone; the report excludes ads. |
| Sources | Google Shopping blog: new ways to reach shoppers this holiday season · Merchant Center Help: About AI performance insights |
What changed
Merchant Center is the product-data hub behind Shopping ads, Performance Max and Google’s free listings. The new report sits under Analytics › Products › AI performance and covers conversational shopping queries in AI Mode and AI Overviews, Google’s two generative search surfaces. According to the help page, it reports four things:
- Share of voice: your AI impressions as a percentage of total impressions across you and your defined competitors for related queries.
- Competitors’ average share: the same figure for your competitor set.
- Frequency: how often search types, terms, intents and attributes appear, as a demand signal.
- Products showing: how many of your products appear for top terms, popular attributes and search intents.
Results are split by shopping stage, Discovery, Evaluation and Ready to buy, and percentage changes follow the selected time period. Data updates daily with a few days of lag. Three limits matter: it covers organic AI traffic from free listings and excludes paid ads; it covers English-language queries only; and share of voice reads 100% if you have not defined competitors, 0 when impressions are insufficient, and a dash when there is no data. Google’s suggested fixes are the usual product-data ones: meet free-listing requirements, add relevant search terms to titles and descriptions, and fill missing attributes starting with the most popular top terms.
The announcement bundled several other items. Business Agent for YouTube ads, a conversational agent inside YouTube ads that lets viewers ask about products without leaving the video, is a US beta with signup by form. The Universal Commerce Protocol checkout integration gains cart transfer to the merchant site and checkout-flow testing, rolling out gradually in the US with Australia and Canada “early next year.” Google also promoted three feed features, the video link attribute, conversational attributes and loyalty data, with two figures: merchants adopting feed best practices see an average 5% conversion increase the following month, and lululemon’s conversational attributes were used in AI Mode recommendations 50% of the time. Neither figure carries a footnote.
Why it matters
This is the first first-party view of how products show up in Google’s AI answers, and it arrives as AI Mode becomes a real shopping surface. Read it as a product-data report, not a media report. The feed that drives these organic AI appearances is the same feed behind your Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, so a low share of voice on a term you care about usually means a weak title or missing attribute, and fixing that helps the paid side too. India is in the first five countries, which is rare for a Google retail feature and worth using while competitors ignore it.
Our view: the number is meaningless until you define competitors, because an undefined set reads 100%. Define three to five real rivals first. Then treat “products showing” as the actionable metric; share of voice tells you where you stand, products showing tells you which listings to fix. And do not let anyone justify a budget change with this report. It excludes ads by design.
What to do
- Open Merchant Center › Analytics › Products › AI performance and add your competitor set before reading any figure.
- Filter to the Ready to buy stage and sort top terms by products showing. Pick the terms where few of your products appear and you have stock.
- For those terms, edit product titles and fill the missing attributes the report names, then check the free-listing requirements for the affected products.
- Note the edit dates. The report lags a few days, so compare share of voice two weeks later for the same time period, and keep catalogue edits separate from campaign changes in that window.
- If you run YouTube ads in the US and sell products, consider the Business Agent beta form; it is a separate programme with its own eligibility.
Still unknown
Google has not published a minimum data threshold, the account types covered, or whether paid ads will ever be included. The 5% and 50% figures in the announcement have no footnote, sample or period. Expansion beyond the five countries has not been announced.
Frequently asked questions
Where is the AI performance report in Merchant Center?
In Merchant Center, open the Analytics tab, then Products, then the AI performance tab. It is available to accounts in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the United States.
Does Merchant Center AI performance insights include paid Shopping ads?
No. Google’s help page says the report covers organic AI traffic from free listings only; paid ads are excluded. A share-of-voice gap is a product-data signal, not a bidding signal.
What is share of voice in AI performance insights?
Your AI impressions as a percentage of total impressions across your defined competitors and your own brand or products for related queries in AI Mode and AI Overviews. If you have not defined competitors it shows 100%, and it shows 0 when impressions are insufficient.
Which countries have Merchant Center AI performance insights?
Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the United States, for English-language queries, as of Google’s 16 September 2026 announcement and the current help page.
Official sources
- Google Shopping blog: new ways to reach shoppers this holiday season ↗ · Sep 16, 2026
- Merchant Center Help: About AI performance insights ↗
Related coverage
- Demand Gen single-tap image ads on YouTube Shorts and Gmail
- Data Strength Uplift: Google Ads’ recovered-conversions metric
- AI Max experiments: budget and ROI tests, brand controls kept on
Update history
- — Rewritten under the new editorial standard with the report location, its metrics and eligibility from the help page, the other items in the same announcement, and a practitioner view.
- — Initial manual coverage under the advertiser-impact standard; original announcement date preserved.
Suggested checks are editorial guidance, not platform requirements. Every claim links to its official source. Report a correction →