THIS WEEK IN PPC

Google now shows your share of voice inside AI search

Google is piloting a new report in Merchant Center called AI Performance Insights. It shows how your products get discovered across AI Mode, AI Overviews and the Gemini app. For the first time you get a native, free view of where you stand on Google's AI surfaces.

For the last year everyone paid a third party tool or ran manual prompt audits to guess at this. Now it sits one tab over from your feed. Here is what it tracks and what I would do with it.

Share of voice

A percentage that shows how often your brand is linked in AI results, split across discovery, evaluation and purchase. Google's own mockup put a brand at 14.5 percent against an 11.2 percent competitor average. This is a relative number, not traffic and not ranking. The question stops being "am I showing up" and becomes "how often versus everyone else."

Competitor visibility

Right next to your number sits your competitors' average share, so you instantly know if you are above or below the market. Google picks the competitor set for you. You cannot change it. It is auction insights, but for AI surfaces instead of the paid auction. Sit under the average and your feed is losing the AI conversation.

Query trends

Query frequency and query type show which product terms, shopping phases and attributes shoppers actually ask about. It only counts conversational, shopping intent queries. Everything else is thrown out. Read this as a demand map. High frequency next to low share of voice is a written invitation to fix that product data.

Organic AI traffic only

Right now the report is strictly organic AI traffic, so free listings. Paid Ads traffic is not in it. The pilot is US only, expanding to Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand in the coming months. So this is a feed and product data story, not a bidding one. Get that data clean now, before the paid layer lands on these same surfaces.

First reported by Barry Schwartz. Additional findings by Hana Kobzová and Brodie Clark.

Which brings me to today's free resource. Because a new report is only worth anything if you can read what it is actually telling you.

Hey, Adriaan here.

Quick one. This is the guide I point people to when their dashboards look fine but the account is quietly underperforming. Google just handed you a brand new set of numbers to read. This teaches you how to read the ones that already decide your profit.

It is not theory. It is the exact framework I use to spot the silent waste, decide what to change and what to leave alone, and put profit ahead of vanity metrics. POAS over ROAS.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

Stop optimizing blind.

Download the guide and start making ad decisions that are backed by something real. It is free, it is short, and if you run ads it will change how you read your dashboards.

OPEN IT. READ IT. APPLY IT TODAY.

Talk soon,
Adriaan