Liam Walsh
Liam is a Co-Director at Intelligency and heads up the agency's Digital Intelligence & Paid Social activity. Over the last decade, he has worked with brands from the world of sports such as Premier League clubs to entertainment such as Channel 4 and Disney.
Google AI Mode, the conversational search experience powered by Gemini, has now passed one billion monthly users. That is not a figure to file away for later. It represents a fundamental shift in how people research and discover products online, and for ecommerce brands it raises an urgent and largely misunderstood question: how do you actually advertise in it? The answer is not what most paid media teams expect, and the work required often sits in a part of the business that advertising teams rarely control.
Your Product Feed Is Now Your Ad Creative
In Google AI Mode, nobody writes the ads. Google’s Gemini AI builds them in real time from your Merchant Center product feed, assembling a response tailored to the specific question a shopper has asked. The factor that determines whether your product appears is not your bidding strategy or targeting setup. It is the quality and specificity of your product data. This matters more than ever because searches in AI Mode run roughly three times longer than traditional searches. Shoppers are not typing “running shoes.” They are asking for a neutral running shoe with extra cushioning, under a certain budget, that does not squeak on wet pavement. Only a detailed, well-structured feed can answer that.
The New Ad Formats and How Eligibility Works
Google introduced four new Gemini-powered ad formats at its Marketing Live event, three of which are directly relevant to ecommerce: Conversational Discovery Ads, which appear as a sponsored response within the AI conversation; Highlighted Answers, which place your product alongside organic AI recommendations; and AI-powered Shopping Ads, which run on Search for considered purchases with a Gemini-written explainer tailored to each query. You cannot target these placements directly. Eligibility comes from running Performance Max, AI Max for Search and Shopping, and Shopping campaigns, all with Smart Bidding enabled. Once eligible, Gemini decides when your product is a strong enough match to surface.
What to Prioritise in Your Feed Right Now
Google has added optional conversational attributes to Merchant Center built specifically for AI surfaces. The most valuable is the question and answer attribute, which lets you submit FAQ-style pairs as structured data, exactly the format a conversational AI wants to pull from. Most brands already have this content in their product page FAQs or customer service logs. Turning it into structured feed data is one of the highest-value actions available right now. Beyond that, focus on richer titles, detailed descriptions naming materials and use cases, and the specific attributes AI-powered Shopping reads when writing its per-query explainers. Start with your highest-spend SKUs. Those are the products most likely to be asked about, and where a stronger feed pays back fastest.
