AI Performance Insights: Share of Voice in Merchant Centre — When Does the UK Get It?

Living document — last verified 29 September 2026. We update this as Google confirms UK availability.

What is AI Performance Insights, and is it in the UK yet?

What it is: AI Performance Insights is a reporting section inside Google Merchant Centre. It shows how often your products appear — and how you compare to your competitor brands — for conversational shopping queries on AI Mode and AI Overviews in Google Search. The report breaks visibility down by shopping stage: discovery, evaluation, and ready to buy.

Is it in the UK yet: No. Google announced the feature at Google Marketing Live on 20 May 2026. It is now live for English-language queries in Merchant Centre accounts in the US, Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand. The UK is not on that list, and no UK timeline has been given.

That gap matters. UK retailers are already operating in a world where AI search surfaces are influencing what shoppers see — but the native data to measure it isn't available here, and Google hasn't said when it will be. This article covers what the feature does, what we know and don't know, and what you can do while you wait.

What's confirmed now

The report sections

Google's AI performance insights help page now documents the live report. It has these sections:

Share of voice. How often your brand or products appear for related AI queries, compared with your competitors. Google defines it as your number of AI impressions divided by the total impressions across your defined Merchant Centre competitors and you, alongside a "competitors' average share" figure so you can see whether you're above or below the market. This is the headline metric: a direct read on whether you're winning or losing visibility as search shifts towards AI surfaces.

Shopping stage scorecard. A breakdown of your presence across three stages of the shopper journey: discovery (the shopper is exploring general product options), evaluation (comparing options or looking for specifications), and ready to buy (close to a transaction). It shows your share of voice at each stage and the types of search shoppers are running, so you can see where you're visible and where you're falling short.

Top terms. The specific terms shoppers are prioritising in AI-powered search conversations within a product category — with your share of voice for them. Useful for feed and content decisions.

Popular attributes. Which product specifications shoppers are looking for (such as size, colour or material) that may be missing from your product data. A direct signal of which products are missing the structured data that AI surfaces use to answer those queries.

Top search intents. The context behind conversational queries — the underlying shopper intent rather than the keyword.

What the numbers do and don't include

• Organic only. Google states the data is "strictly limited to organic AI traffic (for example, free listings). Paid ads traffic isn't included in this report."
• Visibility, not sales. The documented metrics are share of voice, competitors' average share, frequency and products showing — all built on impressions and demand. Google's documentation lists no click or conversion metric.
• Your competitor set is fixed. Competitors come from your existing Merchant Centre competitor set and can't be changed. If your account has no defined competitors, share of voice shows as 100%.
• Where to find it. In Merchant Centre: Analytics, then Products, then the "AI performance" tab.
• Historical data. Google says historical data is available and updated daily, with a few days' lag.

The surfaces covered

The current help page names AI Mode and AI Overviews in Google Search. Google's original launch notice also listed the Gemini app, but the live report documentation does not mention Gemini.

The announcement date

Google announced AI Performance Insights on 20 May 2026 at Google Marketing Live, and followed it with a Merchant Centre notice on 27 May 2026. The launch market list — US, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand — was confirmed in the Google Merchant Centre help documentation at the same time, and the same five markets are the ones listed as live today.

What we're still waiting on

The following could not be confirmed as of 29 September 2026 and belong here, not in the confirmed section above:

• UK availability date. Google has given no timeline for the UK. Neither the launch announcement nor the current help page mentions Europe at all. Our current read: treat it as "later 2026 at earliest, possibly 2027" — but this is inference, not a Google statement.
• Which journey stages map to which surfaces. The report classifies queries into discovery, evaluation and ready to buy, but Google has not said how AI Mode and AI Overviews each map to those stages.
• A paid-side equivalent in Google Ads. This report covers organic AI traffic only. On the ads side, Google's help documentation says Google Ads "currently doesn't offer segmented reporting when ads show within Search AI Overviews" — those ads are reported as top ads. Google says it will announce more when there is more to share.

If your Google rep mentions UK access, we'd value hearing about it — ask them directly and tell us what they say.

Why this matters before you have the data

Google's AI surfaces are already determining what UK shoppers see. Our own AI Mode tests show that ranking well in traditional search does not automatically translate to visibility in AI results — the signals AI uses are different, and the products that win are the ones with richer, more structured data behind them.

The AI Performance Insights report, when it arrives, will give you a native dashboard for that visibility. Until it does, you're operating without a direct measurement — which means the gap between retailers who are preparing now and those who aren't is widening invisibly.

The link between data quality and AI visibility is not theoretical. Conversational Attributes — already live in UK Merchant Centre — are one of the primary signals AI Mode uses to answer detailed product queries. Retailers who have populated those fields are already appearing in answers that competitors aren't. Google's own best-practice guidance for the report points the same way: add the top terms to your product titles and descriptions, and populate any missing attributes. The competitive advantage from acting now is real regardless.

For a broader view of how AI Mode is changing the search landscape for UK retailers, the Google AI Mode 2026 hub is the place to start.

What UK retailers should do now

Until AI Performance Insights lands in the UK, the gap in native data has to be filled with manual testing and structured auditing. Here's what's worth doing this week:

Run your own AI visibility tests. Open Google in a fresh browser session with AI Mode enabled (or use a personal account to access it), run the queries your customers actually use, and note whether your products appear in AI answers — and if so, with what information. Do this for your top 10 product categories. It won't give you share-of-voice percentages, but it tells you where you stand today. Be honest about the result: if your products aren't appearing, the reason is almost always missing or thin structured data, not bid levels.

Audit your Merchant Centre feed for the fields AI surfaces use. Conversational Attributes, product attributes (dimensions, materials, colour), high-quality images, and review data are the building blocks of AI visibility. If these are incomplete, you're not competing on AI surfaces regardless of your ad spend.

Ask your Google rep (or Coffee Marketing Digital) specifically about the UK rollout. They won't always have a date, but they'll know whether there's a waitlist or early-access programme. It's a five-minute question worth asking at your next call.

Get a diagnosis before the dashboard arrives. Our AI Visibility Report gives you a structured picture of how your products are performing across AI surfaces — which products appear, which don't, and what's causing the gap. It's designed precisely for this interim period: you get the intelligence the native tool will eventually provide, without waiting for Google to roll it out here.

From the team

The frustrating bit is the UK isn't on the list yet — so for now we can't just open Merchant Centre and see our AI share of voice. But that's no reason to sit on your hands. You can already find out what the AI is telling shoppers about you and your competitors; you just have to go and look, rather than wait for Google to hand you the report. The retailers paying attention now will be the ones ready to act the day it lands here.

— Carrie Sargent, Digital Business Manager · Social Media Manager, Coffee Marketing Digital