Inside Google’s AI Search Data Surge: What Secrets Are Still Missing?

Ever wondered what folks are really asking AI when it comes to shopping? Well, Google’s Merchant Center just flipped the script with a pilot program revealing the kinds of shopping questions people toss at AI Mode and AI Overviews. It’s like getting a peek behind the curtain at the collective curiosities of online shoppers—but here’s the kicker: Google doesn’t hand you the raw questions. Instead, they serve up a grouped vocabulary of the category, which is enough to tweak your product listings but leaves you guessing whether AI actually sent traffic your way. This new “AI performance insights” report landed quietly in Merchant Center, promising brands a fresh angle on discovery across AI-driven surfaces—though marketers should brace for a mix of useful signals and a fair share of mystery. Curious how this could reshape your SEO and product feed game? Dive in with me as we unpack what’s new, what’s missing, and why it matters in this ever-evolving AI search landscape. LEARN MORE

Google’s Merchant Center opened a pilot last week that shows retailers what shopping-related questions people ask AI Mode and AI Overviews about.

Brodie Clark, an independent SEO consultant who got access on a client sub-account, published screenshots and called it the first Google product to give query data for these surfaces

The query data is new, and it’s useful if you run a product feed. But it’s important to know Google groups the questions rather than listing them individually. So what you get in the report are the vocabulary of a category instead of the queries themselves.

That’s enough query data to tell you which attributes to add to your product listings, but it won’t tell you whether AI Mode sent anyone to your site.

What Shipped

The report is called AI performance insights, and Google’s help documentation describes it as showing how a brand is discovered across AI Mode and AI Overviews. If you have access, you’ll find it in Merchant Center under Analytics, then Products, then the AI performance tab.

Google announced the reporting at Google Marketing Live in May, roughly seven weeks before the pilot opened.

What It Tells You

The report sorts shopping questions by query type, using Google’s examplesof searching by category, researching product specs, or looking for reviews. Query frequency shows how popular a given type has been.

Phase of shopping journey groups the questions by how far along the shopper is. Product terms are the words shoppers reach for when they describe what they want, with Google’s documentation giving “maximum cushioning” and “arch support” as examples. Share of voice compares your AI impressions against your competitors’.

Google’s documentation is clear about what to do with all this:

Click through to all product terms and work the relevant concepts into product titles and descriptions.
Check the popular attributes against what’s missing from your product data.

The second point is the most actionable detail in the report. Attribute completeness has long been a common challenge, and now you can close the gap with a clear demand signal from Google’s AI surfaces. If shoppers in your category are frequently asking about a feature your feed doesn’t have, that’s an easy fix.

What The Metrics Actually Are

None of the metrics in Merchant Center’s AI Performance insights show you a real question anyone typed.

You understand the shape of the demand, rather than the demand itself. That’s why the product terms serve well as input feeds but aren’t suitable as a keyword list.

Share of voice should be viewed in a similar way. Google calculates it as your AI impressions divided by total impressions across you and your competitors, and you can’t change that competitor set, because it’s defined by the competitors already available in Merchant Center. It can also produce numbers that look like performance and aren’t. If you lack sufficient impressions, share of voice displays as a zero. If your account has no competitors defined, it displays as 100%.

The scope filters carry their own limits. Traffic is restricted to organic AI traffic, and paid ads traffic isn’t included. Product category filters one category at a time, and there isn’t a report that covers all of them. Insights only count conversational queries that indicate shopping or brand intent; anything else isn’t factored in.

How We Got Here

Last month, Google began testing dedicated generative AI performance reports in Search Console, starting with a subset of UK sites. Those reports show impressions broken out by page, country, device and date. They don’t include click data, and they don’t include query-level metrics. Both absences were the story at the time, and both are still open.

The same week, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority imposed a conduct requirement on Google covering publisher controls and reporting. The CMA’s interpretive notes call for impressions, click-throughs and click-through rates for search generative AI features, separated from other parts of general search. The click and click-through rate reporting hasn’t appeared. Under the CMA’s decision, Google has nine months to implement all changes.

In July, Google told CMOs that third-party AI-visibility tools don’t have access to its internal metrics, and named Search Console and Merchant Center reporting as the baseline for tracking gains. That was three weeks before this pilot lit up.

Line those up and the pilot reads differently. Google has put AI reporting in front of two different audiences in two months, both times as a limited test. The first answered neither of the two questions people asked. This one answers half of one, for merchants, in the US, with paid traffic excluded and clicks still missing.

Where Google Filed It

In June, SEJ contributor Slobodan Manic argued that Google put AI visibility inside Search Console on purpose, and that the filing decision was itself an argument. AI visibility is search visibility, so it belongs in the search tool, and companies tell you what they believe by where they spend engineering.

The Merchant Center pilot doesn’t refute that. Google’s CMO guidance names both dashboards as first-party reporting, so nothing here contradicts the position that AI visibility gets measured where search visibility gets measured. The grouped query information landed in the dash merchants use for feeds, not the one everyone else opens to check search performance.

Why This Matters For Search Professionals

With access to the Merchant Center pilot, you get two things that change a workflow. You get a demand signal to prioritize against, which is a different input from anything in Search Console, and share of voice becomes a number that will land in a monthly report whether anyone has explained it yet.

As for the rest, Clark isn’t so optimistic, and he drew the Search Console comparison himself:

“In its current form, similar to the recent rollout of AI reporting in Search Console, there isn’t a great deal of actionability behind the data, though it is good to see at least some form of query data being included – something that has been lacking in GSC.”

Most merchants don’t have it yet, and holding an eligible Merchant Center account isn’t enough, since the pilot covers a limited number of US accounts. The check is whether an AI performance tab has appeared. Until it does, your AI reporting is the impression data in Search Console and nothing more.

Sites without a product feed don’t get these grouped shopping-query insights at all. Affiliate sites, review sites and editorial teams publishing buyer guides compete for the same AI Mode answers as the brands they write about, and their reporting is Search Console’s impression data, which covers the same two AI surfaces without any query dimension. The gap this pilot narrows for merchants stays exactly as wide for everyone else in the same result.

Agencies have a different problem, which is the share-of-voice number itself. It travels well in a deck and badly in a conversation, because it’s relative to a competitor set the merchant didn’t pick and can’t edit. A zero can mean thin impressions. A hundred can mean an empty competitor list. Neither one is a bad quarter, and both will look like one on a slide.

What Still Can’t Be Measured

Clicks remain the most significant data point we’re missing. After a year of covering this topic, we’re still facing the same question, and this report doesn’t provide an answer either. Impressions show how often a link to your product appeared, and John Mueller has clarified how those impressions are counted. These rules also apply to share of voice, as that metric is based on impressions.

Individual queries aren’t accessible at the moment, and the details about your competitor set haven’t been shared. As of now, Google hasn’t announced if grouped query information will be available in Search Console, especially for sites that don’t have product feeds.

Looking Ahead

Google says the pilot will expand to Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand in the coming months, which will tell you whether the metrics hold up under more accounts and categories.

The open question is whether any of this crosses over. Google said in June that it would add metrics to the Search Console reports over time, without naming which ones or when.

The nearest fixed point is the CMA’s nine-month implementation window, which covers engagement reporting including clicks and click-through rates for UK publishers. That’s a different dashboard, a different audience and a different jurisdiction from this pilot.

If you want to be part of discussions with industry leaders like Loren Baker, Brent Csutoras, Shelley, Katie, Heather, Roger and myself, then check out SEJ Pro and be part of the new community where conversations happen before they become industry news.