How To Advertise In Google AI Mode For Ecommerce via @sejournal, @tonyadam

How To Advertise In Google AI Mode For Ecommerce Google AI Mode ads are built from your Merchant Center feed, not written by advertisers. Here's which attributes and campaigns get ecommerce products chosen.

The most important thing to know about advertising in Google AI Mode is that you do not write the ads, and the product data that does the work is usually not owned by your paid media team.

Shoppers are moving their product research into AI Mode; most of them never click through to a site, and Google builds the ads inside that experience from your Merchant Center feed. Google has said AI Mode passed a billion monthly users this year, so this is where a growing share of buying decisions now start.

At Marketing Live in May, Google gave advertisers the formats to appear inside it, and getting into them turns out to be less about bidding than about whether your feed is ready. This is a different conversation from agentic checkout, where an AI agent does the buying for the shopper.

That is a separate shift, and I have covered the feed and measurement side of it elsewhere. This is about the paid formats a human sees when they shop conversationally in AI Mode, and what you actually have to do to appear in them.

The New Gemini Ad Formats For AI Mode & Search Google introduced four Gemini-powered ad formats at Marketing Live across AI Mode and Search: 1. Conversational Discovery Ads appear as the shopper describes what they are trying to solve, and Gemini writes a short explainer that connects your product to the specific question they asked.

The ad carries a Sponsored label and reads less like a banner and more like part of the conversation. 2. Highlighted Answers puts your product inside AI Mode’s own recommendation set, alongside the organic suggestions, again with a Sponsored label and a Gemini-written note on why it fits. 3.

Business Agent for Leads replaces the lead form with a chat agent inside the ad. It matters more for service and considered purchase businesses than for straight ecommerce, so I will leave it there. 4. AI-powered Shopping Ads are the considered purchase format, and they run on Search rather than inside AI Mode.

When someone is researching a television, an appliance, or an espresso machine, Gemini writes a custom explainer for your product against that exact query, pulling the features that answer what they asked. Google has said this one rolls out more broadly later this year, with date and location to be confirmed.

Your Product Feed Is Now Your Ad Creative In AI Mode, your feed does the job your ad copy used to do, so your best ad channel is only as good as the team maintaining your product data. Nobody writes ads for AI Mode.

Google generates them on the fly from your product feed, which means the factor that decides whether you show up is not your paid media team’s bidding or targeting; it’s the quality of your product data. For most brands, that data is owned by merchandising or operations, not by the people running the ads.

So, the first question is not what should we bid; it’s whether our feed is good enough to be chosen, and who is responsible for making it so. That reverses where the work goes. For years, the creative lever in paid was producing more ad variants. In AI Mode, the lever moves upstream to your product data, because that is what the model reads.

Vague data produces vague ads. Rich, specific data gives Gemini something to write with.

Specifically, that is the difference between a title that says “Blue Shirt” and one that says “Men’s Blue Oxford Slim Fit Shirt, 100% Cotton,” and the difference between a description that says “high quality for every need” and one that names the material, the use case, the fit, and what it is not right for.

Google’s own guidance for the AI era points to length and specificity, rich titles, product descriptions with real detail rather than a single line, and complete attributes. A one-line description that reads fine in a standard Shopping ad gives a conversational model nothing to answer with. This matters more now because the queries changed.

Google says searches in AI Mode run about three times longer than traditional searches. Nobody types “running shoes” into a conversation. They type “a neutral running shoe with extra cushion for a heavy runner under 150 dollars that does not squeak on wet pavement.” A title and a one line description cannot answer that.

The feed that can is the one that wins the placement. The Feed Attributes That Matter Most At Marketing Live, Google added a set of optional conversational attributes to Merchant Center, built specifically for AI surfaces.

Several of them carry an explicit note in Google’s product data specification that they are primarily intended for conversational experiences such as AI Mode. If you do one thing after reading this, work these into your top spend SKUs. The one worth the