Google Merchant Center adds AI shopping visibility report

Google is rolling out AI Performance Insights, a Merchant Center report that shows retailers, for the first time natively, how their brand and products appear across AI-powered shopping surfaces. Google announced the report on 27 May 2026, and it is the clearest signal yet that AI answers are becoming a measurable shopping channel rather than a black box.

What happened

AI Performance Insights covers three AI surfaces: AI Mode, AI Overviews in Search, and the Gemini app. According to Google’s Merchant Center documentation, the report breaks down into four views. Share of voice shows how often a brand surfaces in AI-driven experiences, benchmarked against similar brands. Shopping funnel performance maps visibility across the discovery, evaluation and purchase stages. Product term insights identify the search terms driving AI shopping and a brand’s competitive position on them. Product attributes insights reveal which specifications, such as colour, style or material, shoppers are searching for, and flag gaps in a catalogue’s data.

The report is not yet global. Google says it is rolling out to a first set of markets over the coming months, which does not yet include the EU or UK.

“AI performance insights will be rolled out to the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand in the coming months.”

Google Merchant Center Help

Why it matters

Until now, retailers had no native way to see whether AI answers were recommending their products or a competitor’s. AI Performance Insights turns that guesswork into a measurable metric, and it confirms the direction of travel: product discovery is moving into generated answers, and the brands whose data is complete and well-structured are the ones those answers can cite. The benchmarking view makes the competitive stakes explicit, because share of voice is a relative number, not an absolute one. For European retailers the tool is not live yet, but the shift it measures is already underway in their markets through AI Overviews.

What this means for retail

For a retail brand running hundreds or thousands of stores, the lesson lands well before the report reaches Europe: AI shopping answers are only as good as the product and location data feeding them, and that data has to be governed centrally to be consistent across an estate. Complete, accurate attributes are what make a catalogue eligible to be cited, so treat data quality as the groundwork now rather than waiting for the report to switch on locally. Keep store-level information governed from one local business listing record so the presence behind every product is accurate, and build a deliberate strategy for AI surfaces with Places AI rather than reacting store by store. For the wider view of how a multi-location retail estate competes online, see our guide to the best multi-location marketing software for retail.

The bottom line

AI Performance Insights gives retailers their first native read on how AI answers treat their products, starting in five markets and expected to widen. European brands should not wait for local availability to act: the accuracy and completeness of product and location data decide who AI shopping answers recommend, and that groundwork pays off the moment the report arrives.