There's a shift happening in how people find your products right now, and this week Google finally handed us a way to measure it. For the past year we've all been guessing how much traffic AI Overviews and AI Mode were actually sending — or taking. That guessing game just ended. Here's what landed this week and what it means for your shop.
Google Search Console Now Shows You AI Traffic — Globally
Google has rolled out its generative AI performance reports in Search Console to everyone, worldwide. The slow trickle that started back in June is finally complete. Alongside it come the AI controls, letting you influence how your content is used in Google's AI experiences.
What does that actually mean for you? Until now, when someone asked Google "what's the best waterproof dog coat for winter" and got an AI-generated answer with a handful of links, you had no idea whether your site was one of those links. All that traffic was bundled into your general search data, invisible.
Now you can see it. You can see which queries are triggering AI answers, whether you're being cited, and what clicks you're getting from them.
Why should an e-commerce owner care about an SEO report? Because it tells you where the demand is going. If a chunk of your category traffic is being answered by AI before anyone reaches your site, that's a gap you may need to fill with paid — or a content problem worth fixing. Either way, you can't make that call without the data. I'd get into that report this week and just look at it. You don't need to act immediately; you need to know your baseline before it shifts again.
Schema Isn't a Ranking Trick — It's How AI Decides You're Real
Structured data has been around for years and most shop owners treat it as a box to tick — install a plugin, forget about it. Loren Baker's argument this week reframes it: schema isn't a magic switch that lifts you up the rankings, it's how machines build a consistent picture of who you are.
Think of it as your shop's identity documents. Your product markup, your business details, your author information, your reviews — if they all say the same thing, consistently, across every page, AI systems can confidently identify you as an entity worth citing. If they contradict each other, or half your products are missing markup, you're a blurry shape rather than a trusted source.
For an online store this matters more than it used to. Your product schema — price, availability, condition, reviews — is what feeds Google's understanding of your catalogue, and increasingly what feeds AI-generated shopping answers too. Sloppy or partial markup used to cost you a rich snippet. Now it can cost you a mention in an answer that a customer never scrolls past.
Practical version: audit your product markup. Check availability and price are accurate and updating. Make sure your business details match everywhere. Boring work, real payoff.
Anthropic Starts Watermarking AI Content — And That Changes the Rules
Anthropic has moved on watermarking AI-generated content, and the implications for anyone publishing at scale are worth thinking through.
Plenty of e-commerce businesses now generate product descriptions, category copy and blog content with AI. Nothing wrong with that in principle — it's a sensible use of the tools. But if that content becomes detectable as machine-generated, the question shifts from "can I get away with this?" to "is this content good enough to stand on its own merit?"
My honest read: this won't punish anyone using AI thoughtfully. What it will expose is thin, mass-produced copy with no human judgement in it — five hundred near-identical product pages that say nothing a customer actually wanted to know. If your AI-assisted content genuinely helps someone decide whether to buy, watermarking is irrelevant to you. If it exists purely to fill space, that strategy has a shorter shelf life than it did last week.
Worth reviewing what you've published in the last year and asking honestly which category it falls into.
Microsoft Brings AI Max to Search
Microsoft Advertising has launched AI Max for Search, part of a wider August release around asset management, targeting and bringing Microsoft Ads into AI workflows.
If the name sounds familiar, it should — Google launched its own AI Max earlier this year. Both platforms are now offering the same essential bargain: hand over more control of matching and creative to the machine, get broader reach in return.
For most e-commerce businesses, Microsoft is the platform they run at a fraction of Google's budget and check once a month. That's often fine, because the traffic is cheaper and converts respectably. But if you're going to enable AI Max there, treat it exactly as you'd treat any broad-match expansion on Google: watch your search terms carefully for the first few weeks, and build out negatives. The reach is genuinely useful. The waste is genuinely real. Both are true.
Demand Gen Gets New Creative and Messaging Options
Google's August Demand Gen drop brings new messaging, travel and creative features across YouTube placements.
Demand Gen is the campaign type that replaced Discovery ads — it puts your products in front of people on YouTube, Discover and Gmail who aren't searching for you yet. It's demand creation rather than demand capture, and for a lot of shops it's the missing piece between "people who already know us" and "growth".
The creative additions are the interesting part. Demand Gen lives or dies on assets, and the businesses doing well with it are the ones treating it like a creative channel rather than a search channel with pictures bolted on. If you've got decent product video — even simple stuff shot on a phone — this is where it earns its keep. If your only assets are white-background product shots, Demand Gen will disappoint you, and it won't be Google's fault.
What I'm Watching
The thread running through this week is measurement catching up with reality. AI has been reshaping how customers find products for eighteen months, largely in the dark. Now Google's showing us the numbers, structured data is becoming the language of machine trust, and AI-generated content is getting labelled.
None of this makes running an online shop simpler. What it does is give you something to work with instead of guessing. My advice for the next fortnight: get into that new Search Console report and establish your baseline, then look hard at your product markup. Those two jobs will matter more in six months than any bid adjustment you make this week.