Google today made its AI Performance Insights report generally available inside Merchant Center across Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and the U.S., giving retailers their first standard view of how their products surface inside AI Mode and AI Overviews. On the same day, Search Engine Roundtable flagged a parallel Google test, spotted by Brodie Clark on X, that routes product-grid clicks straight to the retailer’s product page instead of Google’s multi-retailer side panel.

Read together, the two moves reshape what “organic” means in AI-era shopping.

The report lives under Analytics → Products → AI performance. It calculates share of voice as a brand’s AI impressions divided by total impressions across a defined competitor set and its own listings for related queries. The competitor set isn’t editable. As the Merchant Center documentation notes, “You can’t change your competitors. This is defined by your available competitors in Merchant Center.” The data covers organic AI traffic like free listings only; paid Ads aren’t included.

That last constraint matters. Retailers can now see whether AI Mode and AI Overviews are picking up their catalog against peers, but only in the surface where Google isn’t already monetizing them. It’s diagnostic infrastructure for the free tier of AI shopping.

Alongside share-of-voice, Google is pushing conversational attributes, richer merchant-supplied context for listings. In testing with lululemon, those attributes were incorporated 50% of the time in relevant AI Mode recommendations. Feed hygiene is once again a growth lever.

The click-routing test is the more consequential half. Today, a shopper tapping a free-listing product tile lands on Google’s overlay showing competing retailers. Under the test, that same tap lands on the retailer’s own page. If it ships, product discovery inside AI search stops being a comparison surface and starts behaving like the open web again.

For small retailers heading into the holiday quarter, the pairing gives back two things at once: a scoreboard, and a possible direct line to the buyer. Our earlier read on Search Console’s first AI search report card covers the sibling data feed on the website side.

Google has spent two years telling merchants their products live inside AI results. It has now given them a place to check, and a reason to hope the click still counts.

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