Google adds AI shopping insights to Merchant Center | MarTech

New AI performance insights are added to Merchant Center to help retailers understand how products appear across AI-powered shopping experiences. The reports target advertisers and provide visibility metrics such as share of voice, shopping funnel performance, product term insights, and product attribute gaps. Retailers can compare visibility against similar brands, track performance from discovery to purchase, and identify conversational queries used by shoppers. Google also flags missing structured product details like color, material, and style. Complete, well-organized product data supports matching products with natural language searches. Merchant Center is shifting from product feed management toward AI commerce optimization, making feed completeness and natural language relevance more important. The rollout begins in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand.

"The new reports are built for advertisers who want to understand product visibility across Google's AI shopping surfaces. As more shoppers use conversational search via Search, Gemini, and AI Overviews, product discovery depends on more than traditional rankings or product listings alone. The reports will show share of voice insights, shopping funnel performance, product term insights, and product attribute gaps. That means retailers can compare visibility against similar brands, see how products perform from discovery to purchase, and find the conversational queries shoppers use."

"Google will also flag missing structured product details such as color, material, and style. For retailers, those gaps matter because AI shopping systems need complete, well-organized product data to match products with natural language searches. The update points to a bigger shift in Merchant Center. What started as a product feed management tool is turning into a platform for AI commerce optimization."

"Retailers may need to treat product feeds more like SEO content. Completeness, context, and natural language relevance will matter as Google's shopping experiences become more conversational. The share of voice data could be especially useful. It may give advertisers an early view of how Google measures visibility in AI-generated shopping results, where rankings can look more like recommendations than traditional product listings."

"The new AI performance insights will roll out in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand in the coming months. For brands, the takeaway is simple. Better product data may become a bigger factor in whether AI shopping tools surface, compare, and recommend their products."

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