THRIVE: eCom News - 12 June 2026
This week: Generative AI performance tracking in GSC, Sephora's move into Google AI commerce & Google's latest play for the AI era of search.
Happy Friday!
Here's what you need to know this week across organic and paid that matters for your eCom store:
01 · Google Search Console is rolling out native Generative AI performance reports for your AI Overviews & AI Mode visibility, finally straight from Google
What it means for you: long overdue and genuinely useful, AI visibility is reported natively in GSC instead of being stitched together from third-party trackers, so you can finally see which pages are appearing in AI Mode. We’ve reviewed it over the last few days across multiple clients, though, and the initial enthusiasm has tapered off because it's pages-only (no query data yet), still in limited testing, and, honestly, underwhelming in practice so far. Worth baselining the moment you get access, but the real value lands when query-level data follows and eventually clicks measurement.
02 · Sephora becomes the first prestige beauty retailer to let shoppers discover and buy inside Google's AI with no site visit needed
What it means for you: the storefront is quietly relocating into the AI layer, and the brands that win are the ones that the assistant trusts enough to recommend before a product page ever loads. If your PDPs/PLPs, reviews and overall brand signals aren't readable to these systems, you're not in the consideration set & will be the option the agent never surfaces.
03 · Google's putting Gemini-written ads inside AI Mode answers & the AI writes your product's pitch for you
What it means for you: ads are moving into the AI answer itself (Conversational Discovery, Highlighted Answers, AI-written Shopping explainers), and Gemini generates the "why this product" copy from your product data and site content, so your feed and PDP quality now silently decide what your paid ads even say. The brands winning here won't be the ones bidding higher; they'll be the ones whose structured data gives Gemini a better story to tell.
To read more:
Google launches Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console — Google Search Central
Sephora is bringing prestige beauty shopping into Google’s AI ecosystem — Glossy
Since it’s our first issue of the weekly news, here are two more from us :)
⚖️ UK-first: Google must now let publishers opt out of AI Overviews without losing their ranking: Built for news publishers bleeding referral traffic, but for most DTC brands, opting out of the AI answer means opting out of the buying decision. The useful parts are buried in the ruling: Google now has to share clearer AI-engagement metrics, so better visibility data is coming (hence why point 1 above rolled out so quickly 👀). → UK media groups win power to opt out of Google AI search summaries — The Guardian
📱 Your product feed is now the most underrated lever in eCom: Feeds stopped being a Google Shopping input and became the structured-data layer that decides whether Google, Meta, TikTok, marketplaces and LLMs can surface you at all, and most are riddled with weak titles and missing attributes quietly capping visibility before bidding or creative even gets a say. Fix the source-of-truth data once, and every channel lifts together; it’s a rare lever sitting across SEO, paid, eCom and AI discovery at the same time. → The most expensive blind spot in eCommerce: your product feed — NOVOS
On Sephora, worth noting this is the second AI storefront they've opened this year, after the ChatGPT app in March. Beauty keeps being the test bed for agentic checkout for structural reasons: tight catalogs, rich attributes, high margins, and shoppers already used to asking for recommendations.
The Gemini-written ads angle is the one that's landing hardest with the retailers we work with — once brands understand that their product feed is now the creative brief for their paid media, the conversation about feed quality stops being a technical conversation and starts being a brand conversation. The hardest internal battle isn't getting the Merchant Center configuration right; it's convincing a brand's creative team that Gemini is going to rewrite the product copy they spent months refining, and that the best defense is better structured attributes, not more approval rounds. For categories with high attribute complexity — furniture, apparel, industrial B2B — the gap between brands that have invested in feed engineering and those running default connectors is becoming visible in paid performance in ways that weren't there 18 months ago.