Google\u2019s Merchant Center opened a pilot last week that shows retailers what shopping-related questions people ask AI Mode and AI Overviews about.<\/p>
Brodie Clark, an independent SEO consultant who got access on a client sub-account, published screenshots and called it the first Google product to give query data for these surfaces<\/p>
The query data is new, and it\u2019s useful if you run a product feed. But it\u2019s important to know Google groups the questions rather than listing them individually. So what you get in the report are the vocabulary of a category instead of the queries themselves.<\/p>
That\u2019s enough query data to tell you which attributes to add to your product listings, but it won\u2019t tell you whether AI Mode sent anyone to your site.<\/p>
What Shipped<\/h2>
The report is called AI performance insights, and Google\u2019s help documentation describes it as showing how a brand is discovered across AI Mode and AI Overviews. If you have access, you\u2019ll find it\u00a0in Merchant Center under Analytics, then Products, then the AI performance tab.<\/p>
Google announced the reporting at Google Marketing Live in May, roughly seven weeks before the pilot opened.<\/p>
![\"Google\u2019s](\"https:\/\/cdn.searchenginejournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/sej-pro-banner-809.png\" "\\"Google\u2019s")
<\/p>
What It Tells You<\/h2>
The report sorts shopping questions by query type<\/strong>, using Google\u2019s examplesof searching by category, researching product specs, or looking for reviews. Query frequency<\/strong> shows how popular a given type has been.<\/p> Phase of shopping journey<\/strong> groups the questions by how far along the shopper is. Product terms<\/strong> are the words shoppers reach for when they describe what they want, with Google\u2019s documentation giving \u201cmaximum cushioning\u201d and \u201carch support\u201d as examples. Share of voice<\/strong> compares your AI impressions against your competitors\u2019.<\/p> Google\u2019s documentation is clear about what to do with all this:<\/p> The second point is the most actionable detail in the report. Attribute completeness has long been a common challenge, and now you can close the gap with a clear demand signal from Google\u2019s AI surfaces. If shoppers in your category are frequently asking about a feature your feed doesn\u2019t have, that\u2019s an easy fix.<\/p> None of the metrics in Merchant Center\u2019s AI Performance insights show you a real question anyone typed.<\/p> You understand the shape of the demand, rather than the demand itself. That\u2019s why the product terms serve well as input feeds but aren\u2019t suitable as a keyword list.<\/p> Share of voice should be viewed in a similar way. Google calculates it as your AI impressions divided by total impressions across you and your competitors, and you can\u2019t change that competitor set, because it\u2019s defined by the competitors already available in Merchant Center. It can also produce numbers that look like performance and aren\u2019t. If you lack sufficient impressions, share of voice displays as a zero. If your account has no competitors defined, it displays as 100%.<\/p> The scope filters carry their own limits. Traffic is restricted to organic AI traffic, and paid ads traffic isn\u2019t included. Product category filters one category at a time, and there isn\u2019t a report that covers all of them. Insights only count conversational queries that indicate shopping or brand intent; anything else isn\u2019t factored in.<\/p> Last month, Google began testing dedicated generative AI performance reports in Search Console, starting with a subset of UK sites. Those reports show impressions broken out by page, country, device and date. They don\u2019t include click data, and they don\u2019t include query-level metrics. Both absences were the story at the time, and both are still open.<\/p> The same week, the UK\u2019s Competition and Markets Authority imposed a conduct requirement on Google covering publisher controls and reporting. The CMA\u2019s interpretive notes call for impressions, click-throughs and click-through rates for search generative AI features, separated from other parts of general search. The click and click-through rate reporting hasn\u2019t appeared. Under the CMA\u2019s decision, Google has nine months to implement all changes.<\/p> In July, Google told CMOs that third-party AI-visibility tools don\u2019t have access to its internal metrics, and named Search Console and Merchant Center reporting as the baseline for tracking gains. That was three weeks before this pilot lit up.<\/p> Line those up and the pilot reads differently. Google has put AI reporting in front of two different audiences in two months, both times as a limited test. The first answered neither of the two questions people asked. This one answers half of one, for merchants, in the US, with paid traffic excluded and clicks still missing.<\/p> In June, SEJ contributor Slobodan Manic argued that Google put AI visibility inside Search Console on purpose, and that the filing decision was itself an argument. AI visibility is search visibility, so it belongs in the search tool, and companies tell you what they believe by where they spend engineering.<\/p> The Merchant Center pilot doesn\u2019t refute that. Google\u2019s CMO guidance names both dashboards as first-party reporting, so nothing here contradicts the position that AI visibility gets measured where search visibility gets measured. The grouped query information landed in the dash merchants use for feeds, not the one everyone else opens to check search performance.<\/p> With access to the Merchant Center pilot, you get two things that change a workflow. You get a demand signal to prioritize against, which is a different input from anything in Search Console, and share of voice becomes a number that will land in a monthly report whether anyone has explained it yet.<\/p> As for the rest, Clark isn\u2019t so optimistic, and he drew the Search Console comparison himself:<\/p> \u201cIn its current form, similar to the recent rollout of AI reporting in Search Console, there isn\u2019t a great deal of actionability behind the data, though it is good to see at least some form of query data being included \u2013 something that has been lacking in GSC.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> Most merchants don\u2019t have it yet, and holding an eligible Merchant Center account isn\u2019t enough, since the pilot covers a limited number of US accounts. The check is whether an AI performance tab has appeared. Until it does, your AI reporting is the impression data in Search Console and nothing more.<\/p> Sites without a product feed don\u2019t get these grouped shopping-query insights at all. Affiliate sites, review sites and editorial teams publishing buyer guides compete for the same AI Mode answers as the brands they write about, and their reporting is Search Console\u2019s impression data, which covers the same two AI surfaces without any query dimension. The gap this pilot narrows for merchants stays exactly as wide for everyone else in the same result.<\/p> Agencies have a different problem, which is the share-of-voice number itself. It travels well in a deck and badly in a conversation, because it\u2019s relative to a competitor set the merchant didn\u2019t pick and can\u2019t edit. A zero can mean thin impressions. A hundred can mean an empty competitor list. Neither one is a bad quarter, and both will look like one on a slide.<\/p> Clicks remain the most significant data point we\u2019re missing. After a year of covering this topic, we\u2019re still facing the same question, and this report doesn\u2019t provide an answer either. Impressions show how often a link to your product appeared, and John Mueller has\u00a0clarified how those impressions are counted. These rules also apply to share of voice, as that metric is based on impressions.<\/span><\/p> Individual queries aren\u2019t accessible at the moment, and the details about your competitor set haven\u2019t been shared. As of now, Google hasn\u2019t announced if grouped query information will be available in Search Console, especially for sites that don\u2019t have product feeds.<\/p> Google says the pilot will expand to Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand in the coming months, which will tell you whether the metrics hold up under more accounts and categories.<\/p> The open question is whether any of this crosses over. Google said in June that it would add metrics to the Search Console reports over time, without naming which ones or when.<\/p> The nearest fixed point is the CMA\u2019s nine-month implementation window, which covers engagement reporting including clicks and click-through rates for UK publishers. That\u2019s a different dashboard, a different audience and a different jurisdiction from this pilot.<\/p> If you want to be part of discussions with industry leaders like\u00a0<\/span>Loren Baker,\u00a0<\/span>Brent Csutoras, Shelley, Katie, Heather, Roger and myself,\u00a0<\/span>then check out SEJ Pro\u00a0and be part of the new community where conversations happen before they become industry news.<\/span><\/p> Featured Image: fengdr0517<\/span><\/span>\/Shutterstock<\/em><\/p> <\/div> SEO#Googles #Search #Data #Growing #Gaps #Remain #sejournal #MattGSouthern1784640882<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Google\u2019s Merchant Center opened a pilot last week that shows retailers what shopping-related questions people ask AI Mode and AI Overviews about. Brodie Clark, an independent SEO consultant who got access on a client sub-account, published screenshots and called it the first Google product to give query data for these surfaces The query data is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[450,7947,179,24980,90,3544,95,80],"class_list":["post-12146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accessibility","tag-data","tag-gaps","tag-googles","tag-growing","tag-mattgsouthern","tag-remain","tag-search","tag-sejournal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
What The Metrics Actually Are<\/h2>
How We Got Here<\/h2>
Where Google Filed It<\/h2>
Why This Matters For Search Professionals<\/h2>
<\/p> What Still Can\u2019t Be Measured<\/h2>
Looking Ahead<\/h2>
More Resources:<\/h2>