We've heard this was coming, and now it's here. VersaFeed can confirm that AI Performance reporting is officially live for a small pool of retailers inside Google Merchant Center (Analytics > Products > AI performance). It likely helps if you are submitting AI conversational attributes to Google, but this doesn't seem to be a requirement. If you have access, congrats! You're getting an early look at how Google wants you to think about AI Overviews and AI Mode. If you don't have it yet, here's what to expect.
The headline metric for the AI performance insights is "Share of Voice," but it's worth noting that Google is using the term differently than you've seen in the past. Historically, share of voice has referred to impression share. Of all the impressions you were eligible for, how many did you actually get? Here, it means something closer to market share. Of the total AI impressions captured by you and the competitors Google has selected, what percentage was yours? Same phrase, different math. This stat is provided for your site and your competitors benchmark at a high level and then it breaks things down by funnel stage with stats on query frequency and your "Share of Voice":
- Discovery : broad, feature or style driven searches.
- Evaluation : comparison shopping, reviews, spec-checking.
- Purchases : not literal purchases, just purchase-intent queries, split into local availability ("near me" searches), ready-to-buy (specific SKUs, sizes, models), and pricing (deals, discounts, "cheap X").
Beyond the benchmarking, the report actually gives you something actionable and flags product attributes that are missing from your descriptions. This tells you what values (product attributes) aren't showing up in the text Google can read from the descriptions. Nine times out of ten, this happens on variant products, where a parent listing has five sizes and three colors but one generic description covering all of them. It's a quick fix, and it's exactly the kind of gap VersaFeed closes by customizing descriptions per variant instead of relying on one-size-fits-all copy.
Google has also introduced a query term report showing the language shoppers are actually using in AI search. Think of this as a search terms report for the AI era. If your titles, descriptions, and product highlights aren't speaking that language, you're leaving visibility on the table, and it's something our AI enhancement tooling is built to catch and fix.
There is one caveat to note. Everything here is filterable by time period, country, category (seems like this is related to higher-level GPCs), and traffic type, but right now it's limited strictly to organic AI traffic within AI Experiences. No paid AI Mode data yet, and it's still a limited rollout. That said, if Google is building out this level of granularity for a beta feature, it's a strong signal AI-driven shopping surfaces aren't a side project anymore. Retailers paying attention now will have a head start when this becomes more widely available.
At VersaFeed, we are serious about AI. If you're wondering how prepared your catalog is for AI search, we'd love to talk.