Google Adds AI Performance Insights to Merchant Center

Google is adding a new reporting suite inside Merchant Center that shows how products surface across its AI shopping experiences. The feature, called AI performance insights, tracks product discovery on AI Mode, AI Overviews in Search, and the Gemini app.

According to Merchant Center announcement page, the goal of the AI performance insights is to give retailers a view of how their product listings are distributed and surfaced when AI systems are involved in the shopping journey.

Google first previewed the report at its Marketing Live event. The report will roll out to retailers in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand in the coming months. Google did not provide a firm release date.

What Each Report Covers

Merchant Center's AI performance insights include these features. Share of voice measures how often a merchant’s brand or products appear in AI-generated shopping results compared with competing brands. The calculation is based on the number of AI impressions a brand receives relative to the total impressions for its competitors on related shopping queries.

Shopping funnel performance breaks results into discovery, evaluation, and purchase stages. Product term insights identifies the product terms users search in AI shopping conversations and the retailer's share of voice on each. Product attribute insights tracks popular product specifications such as color, style, and material, and includes an attribute completeness score that flags listings missing structured attributes.

According to Merchant Center Help page, the report also uses several key metrics to benchmark merchants' performance against competitor brands and filters. It includes competitors’ average share, giving merchants a benchmark against other brands already identified as competitors in Merchant Center.

Alongside these metrics is query frequency, which shows how popular certain conversational shopping topics have become over time. Google says this can enable merchants to identify which product topics or search themes shoppers are asking about most often.

Another metric, query type, categorizes the kinds of shopping questions customers ask. According to Google, these could include category searches, requests for product specifications, or searches for reviews.

Google notes that the report only includes conversational queries with shopping or brand intent. Other types of searches are not included.

Merchants Can Filter Data By Category, Country, And Time

The AI performance insights dashboard includes several filters that let merchants narrow the data they want to review. Users can filter results by product category, although Google notes there is no combined report covering every category at once. Additional filters allow merchants to view different time periods and eligible countries.

There is also a traffic filter. At launch, the report only includes organic AI traffic, such as free product listings that appear in Google’s AI experiences. Google says paid Ads traffic is not currently included, meaning advertisers cannot use the report to measure AI performance from Google Ads campaigns.

Where it Sits Inside Merchant Center

AI performance insights will be available inside Merchant Center, the dashboard retailers already use for Shopping ads and Performance Max reporting. Merchants can open the Analytics section, select Products, and then choose the AI performance tab to load the dashboard.

What Changes for Advertisers and Brands Using Merchant Center

For advertisers, this update could change how product visibility is measured across Google’s shopping ecosystem. Where Merchant Center previously focused on structured placements like listings and ads, AI performance insights could introduce reporting tied to systems that generate or influence product discovery through AI.

This is particularly relevant for brands that rely heavily on product feeds, as visibility may now come from both traditional placements and AI-powered surfaces. The reporting aims to enable retailers to identify where their products are appearing when AI is part of the shopping experience, rather than only when users interact with standard search results.