Google’s Seller Center opened a pilot last week that shows sellers what shopping-related questions people are asking AI Mode and AI Overview.
Brodie Clark, an independent SEO consultant who had access to a small client account, published screenshots and called it the first Google product to provide query data for these sites.
The query data is fresh, and useful when using the product feed. But it’s important to know how to Google groups of questions rather than listing them individually. So what you get in the report is the vocabulary of the section instead of the questions themselves.
That’s enough query data to tell you what attributes to add to your product listings, but it won’t tell you whether AI Mode sent anyone to your site.
What Was Sent
The report is called AI performance details, and Google’s help documentation describes it as showing how a product is performing across AI Mode and AI Overview. If you have access, you’ll find it in the Merchant Center under Analytics, then Products, then the AI performance tab.
Google announced the news at Google Marketing Live in May, about seven weeks before the pilot opened.
What It Tells You
The report resolves purchasing questions with type of questionusing Google examples are searching by category, researching product information, or looking for reviews. Frequency of question shows how popular a brand is.
Stage of the shopping trip collects questions about how far away the shopper is. Product terms terms that consumers reach for when describing what they’re looking for, with Google listings for “high discount” and “great support” as examples. Voice sharing compares your AI ideas against your competitors.
The Google docs are clear about what to do with all of this:
- Click on all product terms and apply relevant concepts to product titles and descriptions.
- Check popular attributes against what’s missing from your product data.
The second point is the most useful information in the report. Attribution perfection has long been a common challenge, and now you can bridge the gap with a clear demand signal from Google’s AI realms. If buyers in your category often ask about a feature that your feed doesn’t have, that’s easy to fix.
What Metrics Really Are
None of the metrics in Merchant Center’s AI Performance data show the actual query that anyone typed.
He understands the nature of the need, the need itself. This is why product terms work well as input feeds but are not suitable as keyword lists.
Voice sharing should be viewed in the same way. Google calculates as your AI impressions are divided into complete views of you and your competitors, and you cannot change that set of competitors, because it is defined by your competitors that are already available in the Merchant Center. It can also produce numbers that look like they work and don’t. If you don’t have enough ideas, share voice displays as zero. If your account has no competitors defined, it will appear as 100%.
Scope filters have their limitations. Traffic is limited to AI traffic, and traffic from paid ads is not included. The product category filters one category at a time, and no report covers them all. The data only lists conversational questions that indicate purchase or product intent; anything else is excluded.
How We Got Here
Last month, Google began testing dedicated reports generating AI performance in Search Console, starting with a set of UK sites. Those reports show impressions broken down by page, country, device and date. They don’t include click data, and they don’t include query-level metrics. Both absences were an issue at the time, and both are still open.
This week, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority imposed a code of conduct on Google that includes publisher controls and reporting. CMA’s interpretive notes call for impressions, clicks and click-through rates for AI search-generating features, separated from other parts of traditional search. Click-through rate reporting has not yet appeared. Under the CMA’s decision, Google has nine months to make all the changes.
In July, Google told CMOs that third-party AI visibility tools could not access its internal metrics, and named the Search Console and Merchant Center reporting as a basis for tracking benefits. That was three weeks before this driver turned on the light.
Sleep that and the pilot learns differently. Google put AI reporting in front of two different audiences over two months, both times as a limited experiment. The first one did not answer all the questions people asked. This one answers the question, for sellers, in the US, without paid traffic and clicks are not yet available.
Where Google Installed
In June, SEJ contributor Slobodan Manic argued that Google included AI visibility within Search Console on purpose, and that the decision to file it was controversial. AI visibility is search visibility, so it’s a search engine, and companies tell you what they believe in where they’re engineering.
The Merchant Center pilot doesn’t dispute that. The guidance of the CMO of Google calls both dashboards as the first company report, so there is nothing here that contradicts the position that the visibility of AI is measured where the search visibility is measured. The query information collected comes to the dashboard that marketers use for feeds, not the one that everyone opens to check search performance.
Why This Matters to Search Professionals
By accessing the Merchant Center rating, you get two things that change the workflow. You get a signal of demand that you can prioritize, which is a unique input to anything in Search Console, and the share of voice becomes a number that will come in the monthly report even if someone has defined it yet.
As for the others, Clark is not so optimistic, and drew himself up for Search Console:
“In its current form, such as the recent release of AI reporting in Search Console, there is no action behind the data, although it is good to see at least some form of query data included – something that has been missing from GSC.”
Many merchants still do not have it, and holding a qualified Merchant Center account is not enough, as the driver includes a limited number of US accounts. Check if the AI performance tab appears. Until then, your AI reporting is data from Search Console and nothing else.
Sites that don’t have a product feed don’t get these aggregated shopping questions at all. Affiliate sites, review sites and editorial groups that publish consumer guides compete for the same AI mode answers as the products they write about, and their reporting is Search Console data, which includes the same two areas of AI without any question. The gap that this driver narrows to the sellers is always wide enough for everyone else to have the same result.
Agencies have a different problem, which is the share-of-voice number itself. It’s good in the deck and bad in the discussion, because it’s related to a competing set that the dealer didn’t pick and can’t edit. Zero can mean less impressions. A hundred would mean an empty list of competitors. Neither is a bad quarter, and both will look like one on the slide.
What Can’t Be Measured Yet
Clicks are always the most important data point we have. After a year of talking about this topic, we are still facing the same question, and this report does not provide an answer either. Impressions show how many times your product link appeared, and John Mueller explained how those impressions are counted. These rules also apply to shares of voice, as that metric is opinion-based.
Individual questions are not accessible yet, and details about the contestant set have not been shared. As of now, Google has not announced that the query information collected will be available in Search Console, especially for sites that do not have a product feed.
Looking Forward
Google says the pilot will expand to Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand in the coming months, which will tell you that the metrics are holding up under additional accounts and categories.
The open question is whether any of this crosses over. Google said in June that it would add metrics to Search Console reports over time, without saying which ones or when.
An immediate focus is the CMA’s nine-month launch window, which includes engagement reporting including clicks and click-through rates for UK publishers. That’s a different dashboard, a different audience and a different place for this driver.
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