About AI performance insights

As people use AI surfaces to shop, they may ask longer, more complex questions. AI performance insights can help decode this shift from keyword-based searches to complex, conversational shopping paths.

The AI performance insights report provides a transparent view of how your brand is discovered across Google’s generative AI ecosystem, specifically revealing your performance for conversational queries with shopping intent on AI Mode and AI Overviews. With these insights, you can better understand how your brands show up in conversational queries, evaluate your visibility across different shopping stages, and view trends to help optimize your product data.

Availability

AI performance insights are currently available for English-language queries for Merchant Center accounts in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and the United States.

How to find the report

To access your AI performance insights report, follow these steps:

Sign in to your Merchant Center account.
From the left-hand navigation menu, navigate to the Analytics tab.
Select Products.
Select the "AI performance" tab at the top of the page to load the report.

Metrics and scope filters

The report uses several key metrics to help you benchmark your performance against competitor brands and filters to focus on specifics.

Metrics

Your share of voice: The share of voice captured by your brand or product surfaced compared to your competitors. The percentage is based on your number of AI impressions divided by the total amount of impressions across your defined competitors in Merchant Center and yours shown for related queries.The percent changes are based on the “Time period” filter set. Share of voice is available throughout this report aside from the popular attributes scorecard.
Your competitors’ average share: The share of voice captured by your defined Merchant Center competitor set, helping you evaluate whether your brand's visibility is above or below the market standard.
Frequency: A representation of how popular specific search types, search terms, search intent, or attributes have been. This metric highlights overall consumer demand in order to help you understand what to prioritize and optimize.
Products showing: Indicates how many of your products are appearing for top terms, popular attributes, and search intents.

Scope filters

At the top of the report, you can slice your data using the standard filter bar with these filters:

“Product category”: Filter based on a single product category. Note: There isn't a report that encompasses all categories.
“Time period”: Filter data based on available and specified times.
“Countries”: Filter for countries where you're eligible for AI performance insights.
“Traffic”: Current data is strictly limited to organic AI traffic (for example, free listings). Paid Ads traffic isn't included in this report.

Understand your performance across shopping stages

The shopping stage scorecard classifies conversational queries into 3 core shopping stages:

Discovery: Early stage intents where users explore general product options
Evaluation: Middle stage intents where users compare options or seek specifications.
Ready to buy: Late stage intents close to a transaction.

For each shopping stage, the overall share of voice metric provides an overview on how your AI performance is trending compared to your competitors. Search types help you understand the types of queries used by customers (for example, search by category, research product specs, looking for reviews).

Additionally, there are detailed insights to help you understand at an in-depth level areas in which you may be doing well or where to optimize. For example, if you're viewing the discovery stage, search type: search by product features could be high frequency, while your share of voice percentage may be low. This signals you have an optimization opportunity to improve your share of voice for a high frequency search type.

Actionable trends

Below are the optimization opportunity scorecards you’ll view in Merchant Center, which can help you understand how to enhance your visibility:

Top terms: Highlights search terms within a product category that shoppers are actively prioritizing in their conversational queries (for example, "maximum cushioning" or "arch support").
- Click View all terms to navigate directly to identify all available terms.
Popular attributes: Provides structured technical specifications customers look for, such as Size, Color, or Material, that may be missing from your product data sources.
- Click View all attributes to navigate directly to your available attributes.
Top search intents: Understand the context behind conversational queries, moving beyond keywords to reveal the underlying shopper intent.
- Click View all search intents to navigate directly to your available search intents.

Best practices

To help put your brand and products in the best position to succeed on AI surfaces, we recommend the following:

Provide high quality data and keep your Merchant Center account updated: We recommend to follow the same free listings product requirements, recommendations and provide high quality product data attributes.
Implement recommendations from AI insights report: Add the relevant search terms into your product titles and descriptions, and populate any missing attributes. It’s recommended that you start with the most popular top terms and missing attributes.
Continue to review your report routinely: Your report will continue to update regularly, which may provide new opportunities for you to review and incorporate into your product data. In addition, we are working on exciting new features to improve AI performance insights, stay tuned.

Troubleshooting and data limitations

If you notice missing data points or unexpected behaviors in the reporting screen,

Definition of 0 "Share of Voice" value: If you lack sufficient impressions, the share of voice metric will display as a 0.
Definition of dash “Share of Voice” value: If you don’t have any impressions data, the share of voice metric will display as a `-`.
Definition of 0 products showing: This means there are no products showing. Product showing always reflects the exact numerical count of your products.
Accounts with insufficient competitor data: If your account doesn't have defined competitors available in Merchant Center, the share of voice metric will be 100%. This combination indicates you don’t have competitors for AI performance insights.
Ability to change your competitor: You can’t change your competitors. This is defined by your available competitors in Merchant Center.
Simultaneous “Share of Voice” increases: Your competitor and your own “Share of voice” averages can rise at the same time. This occurs when there are changes in your competitor data such as your competitor set.

Note on data availability: Historical data is available and updated on a daily basis with a few days lag.

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