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

Living document — last verified 23 June 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 new reporting section inside Google Merchant Centre. It shows how often your products appear — and how you compare to similar brands — across AI Mode in Search, AI Overviews, and the Gemini app. The report breaks visibility down by shopper journey stage: discovery, evaluation, and purchase.

Is it in the UK yet: No. Google announced the feature at Google Marketing Live on 27 May 2026. The confirmed launch markets are the US, Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand. The UK is not on the current 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 won't be available here for the foreseeable future. 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 four report components

Google has confirmed AI Performance Insights will include four distinct sections:

Share of voice. How often your brand appears in AI-driven shopping results — AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini app — benchmarked against similar brands. This is the headline metric: a direct read on whether you're winning or losing visibility as search shifts towards AI surfaces.

Shopping funnel performance. A breakdown of your presence across the three stages of the shopper journey: discovery (the shopper is researching broadly), evaluation (comparing products and prices), and purchase (ready to buy). The report shows where you're visible and where you're falling short.

Product term insights. The specific terms shoppers are using in AI-powered search conversations that are relevant to your products — and your share of voice for each. Useful for feed and content decisions.

Product attributes insights. Which product specifications shoppers are searching for (colour, material, dimensions, weight) and an attribute completeness score: a direct signal of which products are missing the structured data that AI surfaces use to answer those queries.

The surfaces covered

The confirmed surfaces are AI Mode in Google Search, AI Overviews, and the Gemini app. These are the three main places Google's AI-powered shopping results appear today.

The announcement date

Google announced AI Performance Insights on 27 May 2026 at Google Marketing Live. The launch market list — US, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand — was confirmed in the Google Merchant Centre help documentation at the same time.

What we're still waiting on

The following could not be confirmed as of 23 June 2026 and belong here, not in the confirmed section above:

• UK availability date. Google has given no timeline for the UK. The announcement did not mention Europe at all. Our current read: treat it as "later 2026 at earliest, possibly 2027" — but this is inference, not a Google statement.
• Exact metric definitions. How "share of voice" is calculated — whether it's impression share, click share, something else — has not been documented publicly. We don't yet know whether it measures paid appearances, organic AI appearances, or both.
• Which journey stages map to which surfaces. The report covers discovery, evaluation, and purchase, but Google has not confirmed exactly how each AI surface (AI Mode vs AI Overviews vs Gemini) maps to each stage.
• The access path. Whether this appears in Merchant Centre automatically on launch, requires an account flag, or involves a rep conversation is not confirmed.
• Whether there's a historical baseline. It is not known whether the report will show data retrospectively or only from the point it's enabled.

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. The share-of-voice data will eventually confirm this; 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, Coffee Marketing

Update log

Date	Update
23/06/2026	First published. UK not on the launch list at time of writing. Four report components confirmed via Google Merchant Centre help documentation.