Google has added AI Performance Insights to Merchant Center, giving retailers a share of voice metric for AI shopping surfaces for the first time. It rolls out to Australia and New Zealand in the coming months. The retailers who measure it will compound an advantage while everyone else guesses.
For years retailers optimised for a search box. Now they have to optimise for a conversation they cannot see.
Google has added a new set of reporting tools to Merchant Center that show retailers how their products surface inside AI shopping experiences. The feature, called AI Performance Insights, was announced at Google Marketing Live 2026 and rolls out to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India and the US over the coming months.
The headline is share of voice. For the first time a retailer can see how visible its brand is across AI-driven discovery compared to similar competitors. Alongside it sits shopping funnel performance across discovery, evaluation and purchase, product term insights showing the conversational queries shoppers actually use, and product attribute insights that flag missing specifications dragging a listing down.
Google is also rolling out Conversational Attributes globally. Retailers can add natural-language product attributes and richer descriptions directly inside Merchant Center, and Google's systems use that structured data to match products to conversational queries across AI Mode, Gemini and other surfaces.
The shift is bigger than a new report. Shopping discovery is moving from ten blue links to a generated answer that names a handful of products. If your feed is not structured for that, you do not slip down a ranking. You drop out of the consideration set entirely.
Why it matters
Until now retailers have been flying blind on AI shopping visibility. A share of voice metric, benchmarked against direct competitors, turns an invisible problem into a number you can manage. That changes the conversation from "is AI shopping real" to "we are 18 points behind our nearest rival on visibility, here is the plan to close it".
For Australian retailers competing against larger overseas catalogues, the product attribute gaps are usually the cheapest fix and the one most ignored. Missing a fit, material or compatibility field can be the only reason a product never surfaces in a conversational answer.
Brand websites now account for less than a tenth of product discovery, with social feeds and AI surfaces taking most of the rest
What to do about it
The retailers who treat AI shopping visibility as a measurable channel rather than a mystery will build a lead that is hard to claw back.