“We Have Definitely Been Cooking”: Ashish Gupta, Google’s VP of Merchant Shopping, on Everything Google Just Shipped at GML
Ashish is back and tells us what the Google Merchant team has been baking: new feeds, UCP, AI campaigns, and the very cool AI Performance Insights
May 20th at Google Marketing Live, before the high-level strategic chat with Nick Fox, SVP of Knowledge and Information at Google (you can read/listen to that one here), I was also able to to sit down with friend of Retailgentic: Ashish Gupta, VP & GM of Merchant Shopping at Google.
Ashish was on the pod back on March 19th which was a very popular episode. He’s a Google Fellow, which is an extremely rare and hard earned engineering distinction inside of Google, and he runs the merchant side of Google’s Commerce focused team.
The org has two tightly-coupled sides: a consumer group and a merchant group. Ashish runs the merchant side. That’s the side that owns the feed, UCP, Merchant Center, and now the new AI performance insights. I got to also meet many of the folks on the consumer side - we’ll work to get one of them on the pod next!
This interview was recorded right after his fireside chat with Augustina Sartori, Head of Agentic Commerce @ Ulta Beauty) at GTL. In that chat , he laid out the 4 things merchants should do right now:
Product feeds
Data strength
AI campaigns,
Agentic infrastructure (i.e., UCP).
In this interview we discuss we dig deep into all 4 for you as they are super-important and should be foundational to your Google Holiday 2026 strategy:
The 6 new conversational attributes — just launched, live now in the supplemental feed (FAQs, related items, popularity rank, document links, additional variants, item group). Why they exist, how to use them, and the “best sales associate in your store” analogy for how AI surfaces are now expected to behave
UCP’s expansion into new verticals — food delivery and travel. Why now, and why the “U” in Universal Commerce Protocol is doing real work
Loyalty in UCP via Google account linking — your Ulta $10 reward shows up at checkout. Critical for merchants who don’t allow guest checkout
Data strength — bringing first-party loyalty data into Gemini / AI Mode surfaces so loyal customers see more of the brands they love
AI Max & P-Max and the new ad formats showing up across AI surfaces (and YouTube)
AI Performance Insights coming to Merchant Center — the new Share of Voice metric, why the funnel doesn’t behave like a normal funnel (it can actually widen deeper in), and how Google is moving from a “click/keyword” company to an “answer engine” company
The keyword vs. long-tail question — in an answer engine world, is there even such a thing as a “popular search term” anymore? (Ashish’s answer is interesting to this one!)
What’s neat about doing these back-to-back is you get both layers in one day. Nick’s interview is about framing: how Google thinks about AI Mode vs. traditional Search, the Innovator’s Dilemma, the ~5 prior attempts at “transactions on Google” and why this one is different, and trust at the intersection of answer engines and AI ads. Ashish’s interview is the merchant-facing manifestation of all of that: here’s exactly what’s shipping, here’s what to put in your feed, here’s how we’ll measure you.
Read both together and you get a pretty complete picture of what Google is doing with agentic commerce in 2026.
Listen/Watch My Interview with Ashish:
If you want to watch, you can see it on YouTube here:
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The Share of Voice metric Ashish mentioned is probably the most underreported announcement from GML — it's not just rebranding impression share, it's measuring visibility across the full AI funnel: Gemini surfaces, AI Mode, and Shopping Ads simultaneously, which is something no previous Google metric captured in a single number. The funnel-widening dynamic he described makes sense mechanically: conversational queries in AI Mode tend to be higher-intent by default, so merchants are seeing better conversion rates even at lower absolute traffic volumes vs. standard Shopping. The practical implication is that you can now have a high Share of Voice in AI Mode while having a relatively low traditional impression share — they're measuring different universes, and teams that conflate them are going to misread their performance.