Google Merchant Center now shows the search intents behind AI shopping queries

Google has added three new report sections to the AI performance insights inside Merchant Center: top search intents, top terms and popular attributes. Brodie Clark spotted the change and Search Engine Roundtable wrote it up on 9 September. Google's own help page at support.google.com/merchants/answer/17200695 documents the additions.

What the report now shows

The AI performance insights report covers how a merchant's brand and products get shown in conversational shopping queries on two Google search features: AI Mode and AI Overviews. It launched in July 2026 and began rolling out to more regions in early September. The three new sections appear under the existing share-of-voice and shopping-stage scorecards.

Google describes them in its own words. Top terms "highlights search terms within a product category that shoppers are actively prioritising in their conversational queries", giving "maximum cushioning" and "arch support" as the examples in the athletic-shoe category. Popular attributes "provides structured technical specifications customers look for, such as Size, Color, or Material, that may be missing from your product data sources". Top search intents "reveal the underlying shopper intent" behind a conversational query, going beyond the keyword alone.

Each section shows the merchant's share of voice for that dimension against its Merchant Center competitor set, along with a frequency figure that indicates how popular each term, attribute or intent is across all conversational queries in the category. Google recommends starting with the top terms and the most-requested missing attributes, adding those terms into product titles and descriptions and populating any absent attributes in the feed.

How this differs from classical Merchant Center reporting

Standard Merchant Center performance reports have long told a merchant how their products fared in Google Shopping and free listings, keyed to product IDs and clicks. This report is keyed to conversational queries and to the model-generated sub-questions inside them, so a merchant can see that shoppers in their category are asking about "arch support" without ever typing a product name.

The metrics have the platform's usual oddities. If an account has no defined competitor set in Merchant Center, share of voice reports as 100 percent. If impressions are insufficient, it shows as 0. If there is no data at all, a dash. Barry Schwartz notes in the write-up that Google has "expanded" the report to more regions this month; the help page does not state geographic coverage.

The consequence for an e-commerce team is narrow and concrete. If Popular attributes on the report flags Material as popular and the feed for that category has no Material field, the fix is a schema edit to the product feed. Same for Size on a product that is sold in one size only: the report will show the shopper demand and the team can decide whether to introduce variants. AI Overviews and AI Mode previously gave merchants no view of how their products performed, and a report that names the missing attribute is the first thing an e-commerce SEO can act on directly.

Source

• Google Merchant Center AI Performance: AI Search Intent, Terms & Attribution, Search Engine Roundtable, 9 September 2026
• Primary source: About AI performance insights, Google Merchant Center help