Google Merchant Center and ChatGPT Ads Manager both dropped AI-native reporting features on July 14. Here is what service businesses need to know about measuring AI search visibility.
Ido Cohen · Published 2026-07-15 · SEO & Search
On July 14, 2026, Google and OpenAI both quietly dropped new AI-specific reporting features — on the same day — and if you run a service business with any kind of digital presence, these two updates change how you should think about measuring your visibility. Google began rolling out a beta "AI Performance" report inside Merchant Center that shows brands their share of voice across AI Mode, AI Overviews, and the Gemini app. Simultaneously, OpenAI added Attributed Sales Value and Sales ROAS columns to the ChatGPT Ads Manager, plus a new product-level report. Neither company made a loud announcement. Both updates matter enormously.
Two separate AI measurement tools went live at the same time, neither with a press conference.
Google Merchant Center's AI Performance Report (beta): According to Search Engine Roundtable, Google Merchant Center is rolling out a beta AI Performance report that specifically reveals your performance on AI Mode and AI Overviews. The report contains four distinct modules:
According to Google's official Merchant Center Help page, the feature is designed to help you understand how your products are being discovered on AI Mode, AI Overviews in Search, or the Gemini app. The beta is currently live in the US, with a planned rollout to Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand in the coming months.
ChatGPT Ads Manager's New Revenue Metrics: The update was first spotted by advertiser Joss Froggatt, who noted on LinkedIn that two new columns appeared in ChatGPT Ads with no formal announcement — Attributed Sales Value and Sales ROAS — just there when he logged in. OpenAI also added a product-level detail report alongside the revenue columns. Search Engine Roundtable confirmed this on July 14.
This is not a coincidence. It's a platform maturity signal.
For most of 2026, the core complaint from service businesses and marketers running any form of AI-era advertising or SEO has been: I can't see what's actually working. You knew AI Mode existed. You knew ChatGPT was sending traffic. You had no dashboard that told you whether your business was visible in those environments or whether your AI ad spend was generating real revenue.
That's what changed on July 14.
Google's AI Performance report is the first native tool that closes the loop between your product data and AI search visibility. As PPC Land noted, Google is building this ecosystem in deliberate sequence — first the AI surfaces (AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini), then the ad formats, then the measurement tools. The AI Performance report represents Step 3 of that sequence landing in real advertiser hands.
On the OpenAI side, the addition of Sales ROAS is a maturity milestone for ChatGPT Ads. When OpenAI launched its self-serve advertising platform earlier this year, it launched with impressions and clicks only. Then came conversion tracking via the OAIQ pixel and Conversions API. Now revenue attribution and return on ad spend are in the dashboard. As Receptive Media documented in their first-look review of the Ads Manager on July 11, the campaigns table gaining Attributed Sales Value and Sales ROAS columns points to proper e-commerce value tracking tied to the conversions and feed pipeline.
That progression — impressions → conversions → revenue — is exactly how Google Ads and Meta Ads matured. OpenAI is compressing that maturation arc into months, not years.
Here's the honest context before you get too excited.
The AI search landscape is moving fast but is not yet settled. A July 2026 study from Previsible, published via Search Engine Land, analyzed 6.77 million LLM-driven sessions across 166 websites over 19 months and found that ChatGPT now commands 92.4% of all standalone AI referral traffic, up from roughly 84% in December 2025. That's a dominant position, and it means if you're thinking about AI search visibility, ChatGPT has to be part of the conversation.
But the same study found that ChatGPT sends 28.8% of its referrals to internal search results pages rather than the specific page that answers the query. The model trusts the domain but can't always identify the right page, so it defaults to the site's own search box. That's a data quality and site architecture problem that no amount of ad spend fixes.
Meanwhile, Google's numbers are large but shifting. AI Overviews now serves 2.5 billion users monthly, and AI Mode passed 1 billion users in its first year, according to Google's own data. A separate BofA Securities analysis published July 14 showed Google's daily web visits rose 4% year over year to 2.8 billion in June — but Claude's web traffic surged 736% year over year and Meta AI reported a 98% increase. The absolute numbers still favor Google, but the growth is dispersed.
For a local plumber, HVAC company, dentist, or law firm, the actionable read is this: your customers are using AI assistants to ask research questions before they pick up the phone or fill out a form. If your business isn't visible in those AI responses — and you have no measurement tool to know whether it is — you're operating blind.
Here's the honest limitation upfront: Google Merchant Center's AI Performance report is built around product catalogs. It uses product feeds, structured attributes, and e-commerce shopping journeys as its measurement framework. If you're a plumber or a med spa, you don't have a product feed the way a shoe retailer does.
But don't dismiss it. Several service categories absolutely use Merchant Center today:
If you're in any of these categories and you have a Merchant Center account, you should be checking for beta access to the AI Performance report now. Look under the Insights tab in your Merchant Center dashboard.
Even if you're not a product seller, the report's underlying framework tells you something important about where Google is heading. The metric that matters most for service businesses isn't share of voice on shopping — it's the logic behind "attribute completeness." Google is explicitly telling merchants: if you're missing structured data fields, AI Mode can't confidently recommend you. That principle applies to your website's structured data and Google Business Profile equally.
According to Search Engine Land's coverage of Google Marketing Live 2026, Google also rolled out Conversational Attributes alongside the AI Performance report — a new product data capability that lets merchants add natural-language descriptions directly inside Merchant Center, which Google's AI then uses to match listings against conversational search queries. Service businesses should treat this as a preview of what's coming for service listings on GBP.
The addition of Attributed Sales Value and Sales ROAS to ChatGPT Ads Manager is genuinely significant. It signals that OpenAI is treating its ad platform as a performance channel, not just a branding surface.
Here's what you can now do in ChatGPT Ads Manager as of this week:
Here's what you still can't do, and you should know this before allocating budget:
No third-party measurement verification exists yet. As BlueAlpha documented in their June 2026 analysis, Meta offers third-party lift study integrations, Google provides Conversion Lift and the open-source GeoX tool, and ChatGPT ads have neither. The only conversion data available comes from OpenAI's own pixel and Conversions API. Until independent verification ships, the platform is grading its own homework.
Attribution is structurally different from Google Search. ChatGPT users are typically in discovery or consideration mode, not ready-to-buy mode. Someone asking ChatGPT "what should I look for in an HVAC contractor" is forming opinions, not scheduling a service call — yet. As North Country Growth documented, last-click models will consistently undervalue upper-funnel channels like ChatGPT by 40–70% depending on sales cycle length. The new Sales ROAS metric in OpenAI's dashboard is better than nothing, but it will likely undercount ChatGPT's true contribution to your lead pipeline.
The practical advice for service businesses: treat ChatGPT Ads with the measurement discipline of CTV advertising, not Google Search. Set up UTM parameters, install the OAIQ pixel before launching a single campaign, and run a 30-day holdout test (pause in one market, maintain in another) before scaling budget. One B2B advertiser documented by Simplified found 12% higher overall conversion volume during ChatGPT-active periods versus paused periods — not definitive, but enough to justify continued testing.
Here is the shift to internalize: as of this week, for the first time, service business owners have at least some native tools to measure AI visibility. That's new. Six months ago, you were completely blind. Now you're partially sighted.
Google's AI Performance report gives Merchant Center users a share of voice benchmark against competitors in AI surfaces. ChatGPT Ads Manager gives paying advertisers a revenue number tied to their conversational ad spend. Neither is perfect. Both are meaningful.
The businesses that will win the AI search era aren't the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They're the ones who treat AI visibility as a measurement problem and start building data now while competitors are still guessing. Every week you're not tracking your AI referral traffic in GA4, not monitoring your GBP appearance in AI Mode, and not testing conversational search queries in your category is a week your competitors might be.
A data study from Adobe Digital Insights found that AI-referred site traffic has grown 393% year over year across its retail client network. And according to separate Reuters analysis of retail and e-commerce data, shoppers arriving via AI sources convert at rates approximately 42% higher than average web visitors. Service businesses are not e-commerce, but the directional signal is clear: AI-referred visitors are higher-intent, and there are more of them every month.
If you have a Google Merchant Center account:
1. Log into Merchant Center and check your Insights tab for the AI Performance beta — US accounts should see it rolling in over the coming weeks
2. Run a product attribute audit: export your feed and compare your attribute completeness against what the AI Performance report flags as gaps
3. Add Conversational Attributes to your product descriptions — plain-language descriptions of what your product does for a customer, written for how someone would describe their need to a chatbot
If you're running or considering ChatGPT Ads:
1. Install the OAIQ pixel on every conversion page (thank-you pages, contact form confirmations, booking confirmations) before your next campaign goes live
2. Set up UTM parameters (utm_source=chatgpt, utm_medium=cpc) and verify ChatGPT traffic is showing up separately in GA4 under Traffic Acquisition
3. Add the new Attributed Sales Value and Sales ROAS columns to your campaigns view and export a 30-day baseline before making any optimization decisions
4. Do not judge ChatGPT ad performance by the same ROAS threshold you use for Google Search — it's an upper-funnel channel by nature
For all service businesses, regardless of ads:
1. Run 10 searches for your top service queries in ChatGPT ("best [service] in [city]", "how do I find a trustworthy [service type]", "what questions should I ask a [profession]") and note whether your business appears
2. Check that your Google Business Profile has complete structured data: hours, services, service area, photos, and recent reviews — this feeds AI Mode citations
3. Set up a simple monthly check: how many sessions in GA4 came from chat.openai.com or perplexity.ai? That number should be growing month over month
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What is Google Merchant Center's AI Performance report?
It's a new beta reporting suite inside Google Merchant Center that shows merchants how their products are being discovered on Google's AI-powered surfaces — specifically AI Mode in Search, AI Overviews, and the Gemini app. The report includes four modules: share of voice against similar brands, shopping funnel performance (discovery, evaluation, purchase), product term insights, and product attribute completeness scores. It's rolling out to US accounts first, with Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand to follow.
Does Google's AI Performance report apply to service businesses that don't sell physical products?
Primarily, no — the current version is built around product feeds and e-commerce shopping journeys in Merchant Center. However, service businesses that sell physical products (HVAC equipment, skincare products, fixtures) and use Merchant Center should check for beta access now. The report's underlying logic — especially attribute completeness and conversational search matching — previews what Google will eventually build for service business listings on Google Business Profile.
What are Attributed Sales Value and Sales ROAS in ChatGPT Ads Manager?
These are two new columns that appeared in the ChatGPT Ads Manager campaigns table as of July 14, 2026. Attributed Sales Value shows the total revenue attributed to your ad campaigns through the OAIQ pixel or Conversions API. Sales ROAS is that revenue divided by your ad spend — the standard return-on-ad-spend metric you'd recognize from Google Ads and Meta Ads. A product-level detail report was also added at the same time.
Can I trust ChatGPT Ads ROAS numbers the same way I trust Google Ads ROAS?
Not yet. ChatGPT Ads still lacks third-party measurement verification — no independent lift studies, no GeoX equivalent, no view-through attribution. The platform reports what it can measure via its own pixel and Conversions API, but since ChatGPT typically touches users early in the buying journey (discovery and consideration), a significant portion of real conversions will convert later through other channels and won't be credited to ChatGPT in platform reporting. Treat the ROAS number as a floor estimate, not a ceiling, and supplement it with holdout testing and GA4 cross-channel analysis.
How do I know if AI search is driving leads to my service business right now?
Open Google Analytics 4, go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition, and filter for sources containing "chatgpt.com," "chat.openai.com," "perplexity.ai," and "gemini.google.com." Those sessions are AI-referred visitors. Also look at your Google Search Console performance — AI Overviews impressions now appear as a separate surface in the updated GSC interface. Finally, run test queries for your core services in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode to see whether your business appears in the generated answers.
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