Google gave you incomplete numbers

Welcome to The Playbook—your backstage pass to marketing mastery. We don’t just share tips; we hand you strategies to dominate the field. Get ready and make bold moves in the ever-evolving marketing game. 🎯

🧐 Google just showed you your AI share of voice. It's the most useful number they've ever given you. It's also incomplete.

The AI performance insights report in Merchant Center is a real signal: share of voice benchmarked against similar brands, shopping funnel performance across discovery, evaluation, and purchase, and product term insights showing exactly what buyers are searching in AI-assisted queries. 

For e-commerce brands that have been flying blind on AI visibility, this is the first native tool worth actually using.

The catch is architectural. It covers Google's AI surfaces only. A strong share of voice in Merchant Center with weak citation rates in ChatGPT and Perplexity means you are winning the measurement Google can show you, while losing the competition it cannot. 

That gap is invisible if Merchant Center is your only source.

Here is how to use the report without being misled by it.

The first move is calibration. Run your top product category queries through ChatGPT and Perplexity immediately after reviewing your Merchant Center share of voice. 

The delta between how you appear on Google's surfaces and how you appear everywhere else is your actual strategic gap, and it will almost always be larger than the Merchant Center number suggests.

The second move is structural and time-sensitive. Conversational Attributes are rolling out globally right now. 

Retailers can add conversational product attributes and updated descriptions directly inside Merchant Center, which Google's AI systems use to match products with conversational shopping queries across AI Mode, Gemini, and other AI-powered surfaces. 

This is the fastest structured data lever currently available for AI shopping visibility and most brands have not touched it yet.

Map your product term insights from the AI performance report against your current feed. Every high-frequency buyer term missing from your Conversational Attributes is a retrieval gap you can close inside Merchant Center today without a developer.

The third move is measurement. Pair Merchant Center data with cross-platform citation tracking to confirm whether feed optimizations are moving visibility beyond Google's ecosystem. SEMrush's AI Visibility Toolkit tracks citation frequency across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode, so the full picture sits in one place rather than three separate manual audits. You can try it free for 7 days.

In every performance review, present Merchant Center AI performance data and cross-platform citation data together, labeled explicitly as Google ecosystem visibility and total AI visibility. Two distinct metrics. Two distinct portions of AI-influenced purchase behavior. One report that actually tells the full story.

The report is a genuine step forward. Just do not let it become the ceiling.

Partnership with AirOps

Stop running AI like it's 2023

Most growth teams using AI are still doing the same work, just faster. The prompts exist, but the system holding them together doesn't.

On June 11, growth leaders from Chime, Bitly, and Udemy are showing exactly how they moved past one-off prompts into agentic Playbooks that run, improve, and maintain themselves.

You'll walk away with:

• The exact path from one-off prompts to agentic Playbooks that run on autopilot

• How to build oversight into your workflow without slowing execution down

• What to say to leadership to get AI initiatives approved fast

Tyler Roehmholdt (Director of SEO Strategy, Bitly), Nicholas King (Sr. SEO and Digital Experience Manager, Udemy), and Bridget Nelson (AI Search Strategist, Chime) are walking through what they've built and what's moving the needle right now.

If you're still patching AI into your workflow manually, this is the session that changes that.

Can't make it live? Register anyway and get the recording in your inbox within 24 hours.

🚀Quick Hits

📸 Instagram has rolled out profile grid rearranging, allowing users to drag and reorder posts on their profile. The feature helps creators highlight key content and customize profile presentation without reposting content. 

🎬 Instagram is expanding Post View Ads in Reels to all advertisers globally. These ads appear after eligible organic Reels (60+ seconds), giving brands a new way to reach highly engaged Reels viewers.

📦 Delivery flexibility matters more than ever. 58% of shoppers will consolidate deliveries, 40% accept slower shipping, and 68% are more likely to return after a fast refund, highlighting convenience, reliability, and easy returns as key loyalty drivers. 

🔎 Google is testing Search Profiles, dedicated Search pages for creators and publishers that showcase articles, videos, and social posts. Users can follow profiles to see more content in Google Discover, helping brands build direct audience relationships. 

💪Tweet Of The Day

💃Events

🔥 70 Practitioners Including Rand Fishkin and Bogdan Babiak Are Teaching the AI Visibility Playbook Live Today

Today | Virtual Event | Free

SEO, social, PR, and content are sending separate signals to AI. BreakingSilos 2026 shows you how to connect them. Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder of SparkToro, and Bogdan Babiak, CMO at SE Ranking, are among 70+ practitioners across 30 sessions. Can't attend live? Every recording gets sent to you.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.

🔥 L'Oréal's Former Global Communications Lead Is Explaining the High-Reach Low-Trust Trap Live

June 11 | Virtual Event | Free

Eric Ford spent years managing creator relationships at one of the most influential beauty brands on the planet. This session, he's breaking down the reach versus trust tradeoff that quietly derails most influencer programs and how his team learned to navigate it.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.

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