For two years, the ecommerce trade press has told you Google Shopping is being eaten by TikTok Shop, ChatGPT, and Amazon. Every quarter, performance marketers field the same question from their CEO. Should we shift the budget out of Google? The data answers the question. Google Shopping ad spend grew 18% year-over-year in Q1 2026, and Performance Max alone now drives 67% of that spend.¹ On the AI side, 83% of the products that ChatGPT recommends in its shopping carousels are sourced directly from Google Shopping data.² The merchants compounding gains are the ones treating Google as the anchor channel in their mix rather than one channel among many.

This article examines why Google Shopping still converts in 2026 and where the largest unspent return on ad spend (ROAS) lever sits in most mid-market accounts. We’ll walk through the four changes in Google Shopping that most merchants are missing this year, and what it takes to optimize Google as the connected hub that compounds gains across every other channel. The merchants who get this right will spend the second half of 2026 widening the lead on competitors still treating Google Shopping as a maintenance channel.

Why Google Shopping still wins

Google Shopping’s continued growth in 2026 reflects three structural advantages that competing channels haven’t been able to match. Each one stands on its own. Together, they explain why merchants who lean into Google in 2026 keep pulling ahead of competitors who split their attention across every emerging channel.

Intent depth. Google Shopping queries are commercial-intent queries. Shoppers searching “waterproof hiking boots size 10 wide” or “stand mixer for sourdough bread” have already moved past awareness and consideration. They are signaling exactly what they want to buy, and the algorithm matches the query to product data that meets the spec. Compare this to TikTok Shop, where discovery is browse-driven, and intent runs lower, or to Amazon, where every shopper sees the same handful of options on the same listing page, and price wins more often than relevance.

Placement breadth. A single Google Merchant Center feed appears in Shopping ads, free listings, image carousels, Popular Products grids, AI Mode, Gemini, Maps inventory, and YouTube Shopping.³ One data investment, eight Google placements, with no other channel work required. Google added new Merchant Center attributes in January 2026 specifically for AI Mode, Gemini, and Business Agent placements, expanding what a single feed can carry.⁴

Downstream effect. Google Merchant Center directly powers Gemini, and the same feed data serves as ChatGPT’s primary product data source. An independent analysis of ChatGPT-5 shopping found that 83% of ChatGPT’s product carousel recommendations match the top 40 organic Google Shopping listings, and 60% match the top ten.⁵ Microsoft Copilot draws from Bing’s catalog, which itself mirrors much of the structure Google demands. The work you do to make your Google feed work hard pays back twice. It earns once on Google and again on the AI shopping engines that depend on Google’s data discipline. We covered the Trust Stack effect in “Your Google Shopping Feed Is Already Powering ChatGPT.”

The largest unspent ROAS lever in your account

Most Google Shopping accounts have more ROAS sitting in the feed than in the bidding strategy. Mark Batson has spent years auditing enterprise catalogs, and he tells most merchants a version of the same story.

I once saw a product titled ‘a white tank.’ Google didn’t know if that was a piece of apparel or a military vehicle. If you leave it ambiguous, the response you get is ambiguous.

Mark Batson

Head of GTM Technical Operations, Athos Commerce

Ambiguous feed data erodes ROAS in two ways. Google either ignores the product, removing any chance of conversion, or shows the listing and charges a premium for the ambiguous match, dragging down ROAS on every click that comes through. Neither outcome shows up cleanly in a campaign report, which is why the cost mounts month after month, with no single line item flagging it.

Most performance marketers spend their optimization energy on bidding strategy, asset variants, and Performance Max audience signals. The underlying feed sits undertreated. Up to 80% of products can be invisible to Google Shopping when feeds aren’t contextualized, according to Athos Commerce’s experience auditing enterprise catalogs.⁶ These losses don’t show up as disapprovals. Products fail Google’s relevance match for specific queries even when they’re approved and live, so the merchant sees the cost only as missing impressions that never arrive.

Title and product type are the two fields that drive Google’s algorithm, with up to five product type values supported in the backend.⁷ These fields hold most of the unspent ROAS lever in a typical mid-market account. Compliance gets you listed. Contextual richness in your title and product type values determines whether your listing gets picked against competitors on the same query. Bid optimization can’t reach that lever, which is why feed quality is the work that pays back fastest.

Four changes in Google Shopping that most merchants are missing in 2026

Four big changes in Google Shopping this year separate winning merchants from maintenance accounts. Each one rewards merchants treating Google as a connected hub rather than a paid channel managed in isolation.

A single Merchant Center feed now drives both organic and paid Shopping campaigns, and the same data feeds AI Mode and Gemini shopping responses. The merchants treating these as separate optimization tracks fall behind those treating them as a single feed with a single underlying quality bar. AI Mode and Gemini draw from your existing Google feed. You don’t need a separate “AI feed.” The same Merchant Center data that powers Shopping ads now feeds AI Mode product recommendations and Gemini’s shopping responses. Google added dozens of new Merchant Center attributes in January 2026 specifically for AI Mode, Gemini, and Business Agent placements, including answers to common product questions, compatible accessories, and substitutes.⁸ The merchants showing up in AI placements are the ones treating product highlights and product details as required fields rather than optional ones. Most merchants haven’t realized their feed has expanded reach. They’re tuning for Shopping ads and ignoring the placements that pull from the same underlying data. We covered the data preparation work in detail in Preparing Your Product Data for GEO. The same enrichment principles apply across any data feed management workflow that operationalizes them at catalog scale.

Free listings keep getting bigger, and most merchants undermanage them. Free listings now drive material organic traffic for retailers with optimized feeds. As of November 2025, Google began showing ads inside AI Mode for the first time, and in April 2026, ads started appearing in the main section of standard search results within product grids alongside free listings.⁹ Most merchants don’t separately measure or optimize for the performance of free listings. The same feed quality that improves paid Shopping ads disproportionately improves free listings, because the algorithm has no bid signal to fall back on. Without a bid lever, the algorithm relies entirely on feed quality to rank free listings.

Performance Max is consolidating, not retreating. Despite the noise about Demand Gen and other campaign types, Performance Max (PMax) remains the engine for retail growth in Google’s recommended portfolio. Google’s “Power Pack” structure pairs PMax for full-funnel cross-channel reach (50 to 60% of an ecommerce budget), AI Max for Search to capture high-intent queries (30 to 40%), and Demand Gen for upper-funnel awareness (starting at 10 to 20%).¹⁰ Demand Gen and AI Max for Search complement PMax rather than replace it. Merchants compounding ROAS gains run this stack with feed enrichment underneath, not bid strategy in isolation.

Merchant Center Next is now the default, but most merchants don’t use the analytics. Google completed the Merchant Center Next rollout in August 2024, and the new console is now the default account experience.¹¹ Most merchants treat it as a UI refresh, but the Analytics tab surfaces SKU-level price competitiveness data and category performance benchmarks the old console didn’t offer. Adding a weekly Analytics review to your feed workflow catches margin and visibility issues that pay-per-click (PPC) tooling won’t see.

How to optimize Google Shopping as a connected hub

The merchants getting Google Shopping right in 2026 aren’t running it as a paid channel with feed maintenance attached. They’re running it as the connected hub that compounds gains across every other channel. Three plays separate them from the rest.

Audit before you optimize. Run an attribute-level audit of your Merchant Center feed before tuning bids, refreshing creative, or expanding into new campaign types. The audit usually exposes 60 to 80% of the visibility opportunity that bid optimization can’t touch. The audit needs to cover every attribute across your full catalog and rank issues by impact on visibility. Its output should be a prioritized list of fixes, not a 200-row spreadsheet of warnings. Athos Commerce’s AI-powered feed audit does this at catalog scale, including for retailers with 100,000-plus SKUs, where manual audits become impractical.

Treat Google as your source feed, not a destination feed. Most merchants build a Shopify or Magento export feed and shove it everywhere. Build the highest-quality feed for Google first. Google demands the most contextualization, and that enriched base then becomes the foundation for every other channel. The intent-rich titles and contextualized product types that you write for Google translate well to ChatGPT and Gemini. Layer disruptive social hooks on top for Meta and Pinterest. The base feed work doesn’t repeat. It compounds.

Measure across placements, not just clicks. Performance Max and free listings share a feed with AI Mode and Gemini, but each placement reports through a different metric set. Merchants getting connected commerce right consolidate measurement across all four placements so they can see which feed enrichments lift across the connected hub rather than which ones move PPC ROAS in isolation. Athos Commerce’s Performance Connector imports impressions from Google AI Mode and Gemini alongside traditional Shopping data, putting the cross-placement view in one place.¹²

The channel that compounds

Channel diversification is real, and TikTok Shop, ChatGPT-driven discovery, and marketplaces all deserve attention. The merchants winning don’t spread thin across every channel of the moment. They invest first in Google Shopping as the connected hub that compounds gains across every other channel.

The same feed work that makes you visible in AI Mode also drives Performance Max ROAS and earns ChatGPT recommendations. While ChatGPT currently relies on your Google data, OpenAI is moving toward a full release of the ChatGPT Merchant Centre for direct feed integration. Athos has these templates ready in our ecosystem, so you can build and optimize that data now to be ready the moment you receive access. One investment, multiple channels of return. As Mark Batson put it in the webinar that prompted this article, the work pays back twice. It earns once on Google, and again on the AI engines that depend on Google’s data discipline.
If you want to see where your Google Shopping account is leaving ROAS on the table, Athos Commerce’s AI-powered feed audit scores attribute completeness across your full catalog and identifies the highest-impact opportunities for the channel that grew 18% year-over-year in Q1 2026.¹³ It doesn’t require bid changes, creative refresh, or replatforming. The audit shows you the lever before you commit to pulling it.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Tinuiti. “Digital Ads Benchmark Report Q1 2026.” Tinuiti, 2026. Q1 2026 Google Shopping spend growth (+18%) and Performance Max share (67% of Google Shopping spend, 68% of sales) reported in Karooya, “Digital Ads Benchmark Report by Tinuiti | Q1 2026 | Key Highlights,” Karooya, 2026, https://www.karooya.com/blog/digital-ads-benchmark-report-by-tinuiti-q1-2026-key-highlights/.
2. Clark, Brodie. “ChatGPT-5 Shopping vs. Google Shopping [Early Review].” Brodie Clark Consulting, 2025. https://brodieclark.com/chatgpt-shopping-vs-google/
3. Search Engine Land. “Google outlines AI-powered, agent-driven future for shopping and ads in 2026.” Search Engine Land, January 2026. https://searchengineland.com/google-shares-whats-next-in-digital-advertising-and-commerce-in-2026-468995
4. Google. “New tech and tools for retailers to succeed in an agentic shopping era.” Google blog, January 11, 2026. https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/agentic-commerce-ai-tools-protocol-retailers-platforms/
5. Clark, Brodie. “ChatGPT-5 Shopping vs. Google Shopping [Early Review].” Brodie Clark Consulting, 2025. https://brodieclark.com/chatgpt-shopping-vs-google/
6. Batson, Mark. Interview with David Sweenor. Athos Commerce, March 12, 2026.
7. Google. “Product type [product_type].” Google Merchant Center Help, undated. https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324406
8. Google. “New tech and tools for retailers to succeed in an agentic shopping era.” Google blog, January 11, 2026. https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/agentic-commerce-ai-tools-protocol-retailers-platforms/
9. PPC.land. “Google Shopping tab now mixes ads into free listing grids.” PPC.land, 2026. https://ppc.land/google-shopping-tab-now-mixes-ads-into-free-listing-grids/
10. Smarter-Ecommerce. “Your guide to Google’s Power Pack: AI Max, PMax, Demand Gen.” Smarter-Ecommerce, 2026. https://smarter-ecommerce.com/blog/en/google-ads/marketers-guide-to-googles-power-pack-ai-max-pmax-demand-gen/
11. Google. “Merchant Center announcements change log.” Google Merchant Center Help, August 2024. https://support.google.com/merchants/announcements/6192467
12. Athos Commerce. “Preparing Your Product Data for GEO.” Athos Commerce blog, April 16, 2026. https://athoscommerce.com/blog/preparing-your-product-data-for-geo/. Performance Connector AI Mode and Gemini import demonstrated in the March 4, 2026 Athos Commerce webinar “Beyond Data Feeds: Winning the Shift to Agentic Commerce.” https://athoscommerce.com/webinars/winning-the-shift-to-agentic-commerce/
13. Tinuiti. “Digital Ads Benchmark Report Q1 2026.” Tinuiti, 2026. Q1 2026 Google Shopping spend growth (+18%) and Performance Max share (67% of Google Shopping spend, 68% of sales) reported in Karooya, “Digital Ads Benchmark Report by Tinuiti | Q1 2026 | Key Highlights,” Karooya, 2026, https://www.karooya.com/blog/digital-ads-benchmark-report-by-tinuiti-q1-2026-key-highlights/.