About AI performance insights

As people increasingly use conversational 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 in AI Mode and AI Overviews. By utilising these insights, you can understand how your brands show up in conversational results, evaluate your visibility across different phases of the shopping journey and view trends to help optimise your product data.

Availability

AI performance insights is currently in a pilot with a limited number of Merchant Center accounts in the US. This feature will be rolled out more broadly, expanding to Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand in the coming months.

How to find the report

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

Log in to Google Merchant Center.
Navigate to the Analytics tab in the left-hand navigation panel.
Select Products.
Select the AI performance tab at the top of the page to load the dashboard.

Metrics and scope filters

The report uses several key metrics to help you benchmark your performance against competitor brands and filters and focus in 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 the number of your AI impressions divided by the total amount of impressions across your competitors and yours shown for related queries.
Your competitors' average share: The share of voice captured by your defined competitor set, helping you evaluate whether your brand's visibility is above or below the market standard. This data is based on your current competitors available in Merchant Center.
Query frequency: A representation of how popular specific query types, product terms, shopping journey phases or product attributes have been. This metric highlights overall consumer demand in order to help you understand what to prioritise and optimise.
Query type: Indicates the type of query used by customers (for example, search by category, research product specs, looking for reviews), independently of their mindset or phase of the shopping journey.

Insights only focus on conversational search queries which consist mainly of shopping intent and brand-related queries. Anything else won't be factored into these insights.

Scope filters

At the top of the dashboard, 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, cost-free listings) on AI experiences. Paid ads traffic isn't included in this report.

Understand your performance across shopping journey phases

The shopping journey phase scorecard classifies conversational queries into three core shopping journey phases:

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

For each shopping journey phase, the overall share of voice metric provides an overview on how your AI performance is trending compared to your competitors. Additionally, there are detailed insights to help you understand, at an in-depth level, areas in which you may be doing well or where you could optimise.

For example, when viewing the discovery phase, the query type, 'search by product features' could be popular, while your share of voice percentage may be low. This signals that you have an optimisation opportunity to improve your share of voice for a popular query type.

Note: Individual queries are evaluated on a standalone basis and can occasionally be mapped to multiple categories if a shopper asks a highly complex question (for example, asking for both pricing and a comparison in a single prompt).

Actionable trends and recommendations

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

Frequently used AI shopping terms: This section highlights the wording of functional benefits or product features that shoppers are actively prioritising in their conversational searches (for example, 'maximum cushioning' or 'arch support'). It displays the number of your products currently matching that term, popularity and your corresponding share of voice.
Click View all product terms to identify all available product terms, then integrate desired concepts into your relevant product titles and descriptions.
Popular product attributes: This area provides structured technical specifications that customers look for, such as size, colour or material, that may be missing from your product data sources.
Click View all product attributes to navigate directly to your available popular attributes and evaluate their current popularity.

Note: This current report only provides visibility for structured attributes.

Troubleshooting and data limitations

If you notice missing data points or unexpected behaviours in the reporting screen:

Definition of 0 'Share of voice' value: If you lack sufficient impressions, the share of voice metric will be displayed as a 0.
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 that 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.

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