Finding the perfect holiday gift has always taken thought and research, and today’s shoppers are increasingly turning to AI to discover products, compare options, and make buying decisions. Today, we’re sharing agentic commerce updates and product feed best practices that will help retailers get discovered and convert customers during the gift-giving rush.

Making AI performance insights generally available

To succeed in this new era of commerce, businesses need to know how customers are discovering them through conversational experiences. To help, AI performance insights in Merchant Center is now available to businesses across Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and the U.S. This feature gives retailers a clear view of how their brand and products are being discovered by comparing their share of voice with other brands across surfaces like AI Mode and AI Overviews, while enabling them take action to help boost discoverability even more.

Bringing conversational help to YouTube ads

Beyond helping businesses better understand their performance on AI surfaces, we’re enabling shoppers to get the answers they need in more places.

Since we introduced Business Agent in Search earlier this year, brands have delivered instant, tailored support that turns shoppers' curiosity into confident decisions. To build on this success, we're now inviting retailers to participate in the Business Agent for YouTube ads beta in the U.S.

Once an eligible retailer signs up, Business Agent embeds directly within YouTube ads, allowing viewers to conduct self-driven research, ask complex product questions, and receive tailored guidance without leaving their YouTube context. As shoppers continue to use YouTube for research and discovery, this feature will take them from inspired to purchase-ready.

Expanding simplified Universal Commerce Protocol integration

We’re also continuing to streamline how businesses scale agentic commerce, starting with updates to the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) integration hub in Merchant Center. UCP already enables direct checkout for hundreds of thousands of brands and retailers across Google. Now, merchants who use the hub for UCP-powered checkout can also enable capabilities like cart transfer to a merchant site and enhanced checkout flow testing, with analytics and more coming soon. The new capabilities are gradually rolling out in the U.S., with Australia and Canada to follow early next year.

Retailers like Tapestry, which owns beloved brands like Coach and Kate Spade, were able to efficiently integrate UCP-powered checkout on Google and start selling their products in Search — including AI Mode — and the Gemini app to get ready for the gifting season.

Optimizing your product feed

Holiday success ultimately relies on an accurate product feed. On average, merchants adopting core Merchant Center feed best practices see a 5% increase in conversions the following month.

In addition to those best practices, you can optimize your feed by using the video link attribute to automatically power highly visual, shoppable ad formats and submitting conversational attributes to add richer context to your product listings. During testing with lululemon, conversational attributes submitted from the brand were incorporated 50% of the time in relevant product recommendations in AI Mode, providing shoppers with more precise and helpful answers.

Connecting your loyalty data in Merchant Center highlights member perks and pricing across Google. For instance, when a member of Minted’s loyalty program, Minted More, searches for holiday cards, they’ll see tailored results with member pricing.

You can also showcase perks like free shipping, drive multiple visits from signed-in members, and steer bids toward your highest-value shoppers.