Google has started showing some retailers what people are asking its AI shopping tools before they buy. The catch: you won’t see a single real question. You’ll see the shape of a category instead.
What launched
Merchant Center’s new AI performance insights tab sits under Analytics → Products. It’s currently in limited pilot with a small set of US accounts, following an announcement made at Google Marketing Live back in May. SEO consultant Brodie Clark was among the first to get access and shared early screenshots publicly.
The tab organizes shopper questions into four buckets: query type (category browsing, spec research, review-seeking), shopping journey phase, product terms (the actual words shoppers use — Google’s own examples are things like “maximum cushioning” and “arch support”), and share of voice against competitors.
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Why this matters more than it looks like it does
If you sell physical products, this is the first time Google has handed you any signal about what happens inside AI Mode and AI Overviews before a click. Search Console’s generative-AI reports, still rolling out to a UK subset, show impressions by page and country — no query data at all. This pilot beats that by giving you vocabulary, even if it withholds the actual questions.
The practical move: pull the product terms Google surfaces for your category and check them against your feed. If shoppers keep asking about a spec — cushioning, battery life, material, whatever — and that attribute isn’t in your product data, that’s a same-day fix with a clear payoff.
Where the data runs out
Three limits are worth knowing before you build a workflow around this:
- Share of voice can lie by omission. It’s your AI impressions divided by total impressions across a competitor set you didn’t choose and can’t edit. Too few impressions and it shows as zero. No competitors defined in your account and it shows 100%. Neither means what it looks like it means.
- No clicks, still. Every version of AI reporting Google has shipped so far — this pilot, the Search Console generative-AI test — stops at impressions. Whether AI Mode actually sends anyone to your site remains a guess.
- One category at a time, US only, organic only. Paid shopping traffic isn’t in the report, and there’s no cross-category view.
How this fits the bigger picture
Regulatory pressure is already pushing Google further than this. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has given Google nine months to report clicks and click-through rates for AI search features to UK publishers, separate from regular search. That’s a different dashboard and a different audience than this Merchant Center pilot, but it’s the clearest signal that click data is coming somewhere — just not here yet.
Google has also told CMOs directly that Search Console and Merchant Center are the baseline for tracking AI visibility, which tells you where its engineering priority sits: inside first-party tools, not handed to third-party AI-visibility trackers.
What to do if you don’t have access yet
Most merchants won’t see this tab for a while — it’s a small US pilot, expanding to Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand later this year. If you’re outside the pilot, or you run a site without a product feed (affiliate, review, or editorial content competing for the same AI Mode answers), your only current signal is Search Console’s impression data for AI surfaces. It’s thinner, but the underlying discipline is the same: treat the terms and specs your buyers actually search for as a content and feed-completeness checklist, not a keyword list.
Bottom line
This pilot answers “what are people asking” in outline form and leaves “did it convert” completely open. Use it to close attribute gaps in your product feed now. Don’t build a reporting narrative around share of voice until Google lets you see — or edit — who you’re being compared against.