Sam Vanderlee

Google & Meta ads for Shopify brands. Feeds, PMax and incrementality, written for founders and growth leads

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Walmart is giving AI agents their own shopper profiles. Here's the feed work behind it.

On Oct 21, Walmart announced Agent Profiles, scheduled for next month. Shoppers authorize each agent, and its purchases show up separately from their own.

Shoppers choose how much freedom the agent gets:

• Approve every purchase.

• Or allow purchases up to a limit the shopper sets, with $50, $100 and $200 given as examples.

Walmart also announced an Agent Gateway, an invitation-only beta built on MCP for companies and developers. Agents can search Walmart and Sam's Club and complete purchases without seeing the shopper's broader history.

Shopify Catalog, Copilot Checkout and now Walmart read the same basics: titles, attributes, price and availability.

One feed audit covers all three.

If an agent is shopping for an item it can match exactly, the listing with complete attributes is the easier one to match. That's my read, not Walmart's claim.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Shopify now tells AI shopping agents when your product is marked down. Check the toggle.

Shopify's Oct 9 changelog says compare-at prices are now shared with AI shopping agents through Shopify Catalog. The strikethrough price can show up where the agent shows your product.

Shopify's help center puts the control at Sales channels, then Agentic, then Shopify Catalog, then Review product data mapping, then Compare-at.

The setting sends a compare-at price only when it's higher than the current price. The setting has a default and doesn't change by itself when you change how you use compare-at.

Three checks, about 5 minutes:

• Open that setting and decide whether you want agents quoting your "was" price.

• Confirm every compare-at price is one you actually charged. Agents will repeat it to shoppers.

• Look for products with a compare-at price left over from an old sale.

Your "was" price used to be read by humans who had learned to ignore it. Now it's read by software that takes it literally.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Google is testing Shopping ads that grow a gray box of product attributes. Audit your feed before it reaches you.

Search Engine Roundtable reported on Oct 22 that Sponsored Products results are expanding to show attributes at the bottom of the ad, on a gray background.

Barry Schwartz said he wasn't sure he'd seen attributes in Sponsored Products before. He also hadn't seen them load in after the ad appears.

Google hasn't said which attributes appear or where they come from. Your product feed is the obvious suspect.

A 10-minute audit on your top 20 products:

• Color, size, material and pattern filled in, and not just in the title.

• Shipping speed and cost matching your checkout.

• Product type and category using the same wording across variants.

Google has tested background colors on Shopping ads a few times before.

The feed work pays off whether this test stays or not.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Google Shopping can now bid more for high-value new customers. Check three things first.

Google announced three updates on Oct 22. New Customer High Value Mode is coming to Shopping this month, retention goals are widening across PMax, Search and Shopping, and percentage multipliers are rolling out.

The retention goals:

• Re-engagement Mode, for customers who haven't bought recently.

• Loyalty Mode, for loyalty program members.

• Retention Only Mode, for campaigns aimed only at specified existing customers.

A multiplier scales with order value. At 1.2x, a $50 purchase and a $500 purchase both get 20% more value in bidding, per Search Engine Land.

Before you touch any of it:

• Is your customer list current? Search Engine Land's own caveat is that this depends on reliable customer data.

• Are you on value-based bidding? Lifecycle goals work with it, and customer segments need at least 1,000 active members.

• Start at the low end of the range. PPC Land reports 1.1x as the floor.

A multiplier is an opinion about what a customer is worth, handed to a bidding system that will believe it completely.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Google AI Mode is showing "Buy 4 get $20 off" inside Shopping ads. Do you have an offer to show?

Search Engine Watch spotted it on Oct 12. Before that, AI Mode Shopping ads showed the product image, name, price, brand and reviews.

The offer now sits in the ad, and a click opens a popup with the details. That's how offers already work in standard Shopping ads.

Black Friday is Nov 27, so check your Merchant Center promotions now:

• Which promotions are active and approved right now. One still in review shows nothing.

• Whether each offer can be redeemed at checkout as written. Google's promotions policy requires it.

• Whether the offer text matches your site.

Build in time for review. Google reviews promotions before they show, and the week you need it will be the week it's slow.

This is one reporter's sighting, not a Google announcement. It's also a cheap check, which is a good reason to run it anyway.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

If your fastest shipping option costs extra, Google Shopping may be hiding it.

Merchant Center's help page says that with more than one shipping policy, Google Search shows the lowest delivery fee first, then the fastest. Free shipping in 7 days beats $2.99 in 3 days by default.

The "Get it fast" filter is how shoppers find the fast one, and it's US-only for now. In the US, fast means delivery within 3 days.

Black Friday is Nov 27. Google's own page says up to 1 in 5 shoppers abandon carts over delivery speed.

What to check in Merchant Center:

• Under Overview, look for an opportunity card to add a fast shipping policy. It fills in values from what Google's StoreBot crawled on your site.

• Compare the delivery speed and cost you submit with what checkout shows. Google says they need to match to qualify for badges like "Free 3-day" or "Get it by [Date]."

• If you can't hit 3 days everywhere, set the fast policy by state or ZIP range so the promise only shows where it's true.

Your default listing may say "Free, 7 days" while the tab shoppers filter by sits behind a fee nobody can see.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

If you run Meta ads, check your product pages before Oct 30. Meta's new terms let it crawl them.

The Commercial Terms take effect Oct 30. One clause lets Meta use crawlers and "create test credentials" to reach pages "associated with your products or services," then keep pulling updates.

The stated purpose: to "provide, develop, improve, research and maintain advertising and business products."

The first draft also said "train." That word vanished between Oct 15 and Oct 20, after publishers objected, and the crawling stayed.

The News/Media Alliance has given Meta until Oct 26 to respond, per PPC Land. Meta says the crawling terms apply to ads and business products.

Meta also says robots.txt still works as a signal. The terms never mention it.

Deleting one word is an efficient way to handle a backlash.

For a store, the page is now a source next to the feed. If the two disagree on price, stock or variant names, the shopper may see whichever one Meta read.

The setup I'd ship:

• Top sellers checked page-against-feed for price, availability and variant names before Oct 30.

• Any page behind a login (wholesale, member pricing) reviewed, since test credentials exist to get past exactly that.

• A deliberate robots.txt decision for Meta's crawlers, written down, instead of whatever the theme shipped with.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

On Oct 14, Google gave PMax a Display dial.

You can now tell it how much of your daily budget the Display Network is allowed to touch.

Two controls are rolling out across Search, Shopping, PMax and Demand Gen:

• Channel prioritization marks inventory "High" or "Low."

• Budget allocation caps Low-priority channels at a percentage of daily budget.

For PMax, the groups are "Google channels" (Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Discover), Search partners and the Display Network. Shopping gets Google Search and Search partners.

Greg Finn tried to explain it on video: "Halfway through you can watch my brain break in real time."

Here's the part most explainers skip.

If your campaign runs on tROAS and isn't budget-limited, priority alone does almost nothing. Google says it "will generally not have an impact there." The percentage cap is the lever that bites.

And the cap is "best-effort." Think strong suggestion, with Google holding the pen.

One date for the calendar: in February 2027, Search campaigns with Display on lose their current spend setup. To keep it, Google says set Display to Low priority with a 50% allocation.

The setup I'd ship:

1. Pull PMax placement and channel reports first, so you know what Display costs you today.

2. On tROAS campaigns, set Display and Search partners to Low with a small percentage, then compare two weeks against the old split.

3. Leave your best Shopping campaigns alone until Black Friday is over, then test there.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Meta's new shopping agent has a rule about small stores. It's not a nice one.

Profound pulled what it says is the instruction file for Muse, Meta's shopping agent. It calls it "imperative" that the top five products come from well-known merchants, per PPC Land.

Then the test. In 50 prompts from one account, Meta's catalog supplied about 95% of the candidates and won about a third of the slots.

The rest went to sites the agent found on the open web.

Profound's economist Jennifer Zou: "Much more weight is placed on candidates returned by the web search."

And if you're on Shopify, you're probably already in that catalog. Shopify shares products with Meta by default.

r/ecommerce took it about as well as you'd expect. u/frizzbey: "Everything is stacked against you if you run a small store, honestly lolol."

Caveats are real. It's one account, a small sample, and Meta hasn't commented.

But "well-known" is doing a lot of work in that file, and nobody outside Meta knows how it's defined.

The setup I'd ship:

1. Check Sales channels, then Agentic, and confirm what Meta can see for your top products.

2. Make the brand findable on the open web: reviews, press, and a product page that answers the question in plain text.

3. Keep prices inside your category's normal range on hero SKUs, since the file says outliers get discarded.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

On Oct 15, Google put a shopping cart inside Search and the Gemini app.

It's called Universal Cart. US shoppers can save products from different stores into one cart, and Google keeps an eye on every item.

Price drop? Google pings the shopper.

Back in stock? Another ping.

Promo codes it found somewhere show up next to the product too.

So your abandoned-cart email has a new competitor. This one works for Google and doesn't unsubscribe.

eMarketer's read is the part I'd tape to the monitor. The cart pulls prices and stock from a Shopping Graph of more than 60 billion listings, and making comparisons this easy "could intensify price competition."

Checkout is uneven for now.

Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair and "many Shopify merchants" get Google Pay right in the cart. Everyone else gets the cart handed back to their own site.

You stay the seller of record either way. Google just holds the cart.

The setup I'd ship:

1. Check that price and availability on your best sellers match the site in Merchant Center today, since the cart's price and restock alerts run on Google's shopping data.

2. Save one of your products to the cart from your phone and try to check out. Note whether it finishes in Google Pay or bounces to your site, because that's the path holiday shoppers will take.

3. Plan November price moves knowing a saved shopper gets told when you drop. A Thursday-night price cut is now a push notification.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Google quietly stopped blocking blurry product photos from Shopping.

The Merchant Center help page used to say a low-quality image meant the product "may be prevented from showing in ads and free listings until the image quality improves."

That line is gone. The product now keeps showing.

No announcement. Hana Kobzová spotted the edit, and Search Engine Roundtable compared the two versions on Oct 12.

So the warning that used to force a reshoot is now a note in Needs attention. Which is where good intentions go to retire.

Google's own page still says image quality "correlates strongly with user engagement and clicks." Your pixelated hero shot is still in the auction.

It just loses more politely.

Two rules didn't move:

• Images must be at least 500 × 500 from January 31, 2027.

• Promo text on the image ("Buy Now," prices, offers) can still get the product disapproved.

The setup I'd ship:

1. Download the Low image quality list from Needs attention and sort it by your top sellers.

2. Reshoot or re-export the ones you'd actually miss before Q4, since nothing is going to force you now.

3. Flag anything under 500 × 500 or carrying a sale badge, because those two still have teeth.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Shop AI told customers an accessory was free.

So the merchant shipped it free.

From r/shopify this week:

• u/DavidianTheLesser: Shop AI "blended summaries from one of my core products and a bundle. Stating to customers in the Highlights that the accessory is included for free."

• u/waffleos1: "an unacceptable amount of hallucination on our product description 'highlights'"

• u/Intelligent-Copy-200: "Shop AI made up a fake discount code on my store last month."

The first merchant says Shopify support acknowledged the error was on their side. He sent the accessory anyway, so nobody could accuse him of false advertising.

Here's the mechanism.

Shopify Catalog writes "inferred" highlights from your product data, and they show up in Shop and other AI surfaces. Per Hearsay's breakdown, you can't edit those inferred fields or turn off the AI summaries on their own.

So the copy your customer reads is partly written by a model, from a page you wrote for humans.

If your bundle and your single product share half a description, the model will merge them. Generously.

The setup I'd ship:

1. Search your own store in the Shop app and read the Highlights on your top ten products like a skeptical customer.

2. Rewrite any product page that mentions a bundle, a gift or a code so the condition sits in the same sentence as the offer.

3. If it keeps happening, switch Shop's selling method to "Link to online store" while you fix the source copy.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

On Oct 13, Shopify let any AI agent buy from its catalog.

Your store is in it by default, along with over a billion products.

It's called Shop MCP. One connection lets an agent search Shopify Catalog, build a cart and pay with Shop Pay. Search doesn't even need an API key.

Shopify's changelog explains why: before this, an agent "had to send the shopper to the store's website to pay, which often caused drop-off."

So the drop-off is gone, and so is the visit. The shopper never sees your homepage, your upsell or your email popup. The popup will survive.

The Verge adds the part that should change your product data this week. Shoppers can give the agent rules, like a budget cap or "only show products with fast shipping."

That's a filter you can fail without knowing it.

If your shipping speed is vague in the catalog, an agent told "fast shipping only" has no reason to pick you. Buyers still approve every purchase, from a shortlist a machine built by reading your fields.

The setup I'd ship:

1. Run your own top products through `shop search` and see what an agent gets back.

2. Put real delivery times in your shipping settings and product data, in days, for your main markets.

3. Make the price, variants and stock on your hero SKUs match the site exactly, since that's all the agent sees.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Bing just started telling stores which AI answers quote their competitors and skip them.

The new beta tab in Bing Webmaster Tools is called Topics Portfolio. It groups the questions people ask Copilot and Bing's AI answers into topics.

Then it lists "Opportunity Queries." In Microsoft's words, queries "where other sites appear and yours does not."

Google gives you nothing like it. Search Console's AI report shows impressions, with no queries at all.

Now the fine print, because Microsoft wrote plenty:

"Treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger."

Volumes come as ranges. Smaller sites "may not even see this feature." And it won't name the competitor who got cited, only that someone did.

My favorite caveat: competitor-branded queries can show up as your opportunities. So Bing may suggest you go get cited for your rival's product name.

Bold strategy.

Still, it's the first list from an AI engine itself of buying questions where you're missing. Bing's share is small, and no other engine hands you this.

The setup I'd ship:

1. Open AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools and check the Topics tab exists for your site.

2. Pull the opportunity queries, then strike every one with a competitor's brand in it.

3. Map what's left to a product or collection page, and fix the page that should have been the answer.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

The most underused input in a DTC ad account is twenty minutes of watching people fail to buy.

Most founders install a session replay tool, watch four recordings, feel weird about it, and never open it again. Nobody told them what to look for.

Three behaviors are worth the time, and each one points at a different fix.

The stall. Paid visitors keep stopping on the same section: the guarantee, the ingredients, the shipping terms.

That section is carrying an objection, and the cheapest fix is often answering it in the ad, before the click.

The variant shuffle. Toggling options, opening the size guide twice, then leaving.

That's the gap between how you organized the catalog and how buyers think, and it tends to show up again in returns.

The price loop. Cart, leave, come back an hour later, leave again.

They want the product and not the terms, so the loop tells you whether to test shipping, a bundle or the subscription price.

The setup I'd ship this week:
1. Filter replays to sessions that came from paid ads.
2. Sort by longest time on site without a purchase.
3. Watch twenty, and tag each one stall, shuffle or loop.
4. Fix whichever tag shows up most, starting with the ad if it's a stall.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Your Shopping titles might be spending their best 70 characters on a name nobody searches.

Google lets a title run 150 characters, but its own Merchant Center help says users "will usually notice only the first 70 or fewer." Put the most important details first, it says.

Most Shopify feeds open with the brand, because that's how the product page reads. A stranger scanning "Vanderlee Hydrating Serum" learns nothing until word three.

Here's the twist. Google's apparel guide does say to put strong brand names first, and it tells you how to check: see whether people search for the brand in Google Trends.

So the rule cuts both ways. A brand people type into Google earns the front of the title.

A brand they've never heard of is sitting where the product type should be.

The setup I'd ship:
1. Look the brand up in Google Trends. If it's a flat line, the brand moves to the end.
2. Lead with what it is and the attribute people search for, like "Hydrating Vitamin C Serum for Dry Skin."
3. Fit size, material or variant inside the first 70 characters.
4. Make the change through a supplemental feed or feed rules, so the IDs and the store stay untouched.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Google hired a salesperson for your store. You don't get to hear the pitch.

That's close to Google's own framing. Ginny Marvin described Direct Offers in AI Mode as "less like a standard ad and more like a salesperson negotiating a deal on your behalf."

This week the setup showed up inside Google Ads as a beta asset. What you hand the salesperson:

• A short description. Google uses it to decide when the offer shows, and it writes the shopper-facing text itself.
• One incentive or several. With several, Google AI picks which one each shopper sees.
• Optional single-use codes by CSV, terms, dates, and a daily cap by value or by number of claims.
• It only serves on campaigns running AI Max or text customization.

The shopper sees "Claim one-time code" under a sponsored result, gets the code, and lands on your site.

Google's promise is that the AI will "never 'invent' a deal." That holds. It picks from the ones you gave it.

Upload a small discount and a deep one, and the deep one is on the table in every conversation Google scores as close to buying.

Here's the catch. A shopper who is close to buying is the one who needed the discount least.

Search Engine Land's own write-up says to watch whether offers drive extra sales or are "simply discounting purchases that would have happened anyway."

Daniel Feldman did the margin math: "A 20% offer on a 70% margin product is a sharp way to close a sale. The same 20% on a 25% margin product can turn a profitable order into a loss."

He also flagged the slow leak: "If buyers learn that asking AI Mode the right way gets them a discount, some of them will stop paying full price."

The setup I'd ship before uploading a single code:

1. One incentive, sized so the thinnest-margin product in that campaign still makes money.
2. Single-use codes in the CSV, so one code is one order.
3. A daily cap on day one. Left blank, the offer runs to the end date or the last code.
4. A week later, I'd judge it on new-customer orders and margin after the discount.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

$9.9 billion. Two days.

Adobe's number for Amazon's October event on Oct 6 and 7, up 9.2 percent, with discounts peaking at 19 percent off listed price. A Shopify brand builder who pastes that 19 percent onto the hero SKU is spending November's margin on a Tuesday.

Adobe put the forecast out on Sept 28. November and December online spend is $275.1 billion, up 6.7 percent.

October sits outside that window at $95.8 billion, up 8 percent, but the two-day slice is what got pasted this weekend. The calendar under it did not.

What Adobe scheduled:

• Oct 6-7 peaks at 19 percent off listed price.
• Early November stays up to 14 percent off.
• The week before Thanksgiving goes to 21 percent off.
• Cyber Week reaches 30 percent off listed price, and that deeper cut lands well after Tuesday.

Apparel is forecast at $51.3 billion, and its deepest discount is 23 percent off on Black Friday. Tuesday's 19 percent is the warm-up.

A percent off cuts the sticker. Unit cost and shipping stay in dollars, so contribution margin shrinks faster than the price does.

The $9.9 billion still gets spent if the hero SKU skips the 19 percent. Adobe put apparel's deeper cut on Black Friday, Nov 27.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Google emailed Shopify brands that native checkout is live in AI Mode and Gemini.

Eligible products were auto-included. Nothing to set up.

That is the problem.

A Merchant Center match flipped Direct checkout on by default. Buyers can pay inside Google without opening your store.

Discovery staying on is fine. Defaulting the cash register off your site is a channel decision, not a quiet toggle.

Shopify's own docs list what native checkout drops:

• Google Analytics and custom pixels do not fire. Only server-to-server started and completed events.
• Checkout blocks for upsells, loyalty, and consent collection may not load.
• Subscriptions, bundles, and customizable products are unsupported.

Owner check this morning:

1. Open Shopify → Sales channels → Agentic and turn off Allow Shopify to manage for me if you want manual control.
2. Open Google AI Mode and Gemini and read whether Direct checkout is on.
3. Keep discovery. Decide native checkout on purpose, not by default.
4. Split those orders for new-customer rate, contribution margin, and 60-day repeat.

If your media buyer cannot tell you which way that toggle sits today, the channel already chose for you.

[Sam Vanderlee @samvanderlee]

Shopify reports AI searches using Catalog data convert at 2x the rate of searches using scraped data.

That is a feed-quality receipt hiding inside an AI announcement.

Scraped page:

• Guesses the product category
• Misses variant relationships
• Reads stale price or availability
• Extracts whatever the theme happens to expose

Structured catalog:

• Knows the exact taxonomy
• Resolves size, color, and material
• Reads current price and inventory
• Carries delivery and policy context

Same product, different confidence.

An AI shopping agent is trying to reduce purchase risk for the buyer.

When the data is incomplete, the safe action is to recommend a product it understands better.

That means the brand with the prettier product page can lose to the brand with the cleaner data schema.

You can test your side of this today: describe your best-seller to any AI assistant in plain language and see whether your product comes back. The test is free, and it stings.

The second consequence is creative diagnosis.

A Shopify brand builder may blame weak ads when the actual failure sits upstream: the agent cannot match the item to a natural-language request like "machine-washable cream rug for a nursery under $300."

The third consequence is catalog operations.

Feed QA now belongs beside creative QA:

• Attribute completeness by SKU
• Variant consistency
• Inventory freshness
• Shipping accuracy
• Policy parity across surfaces

In one DTC account, an SEO-enriched feed rewrite helped take Google Shopping to 3-4x ROAS and lifted product CVR from 0.5% to 0.75-1%+. December promotion volume later peaked much higher, so I would never present that peak as the steady-state result.

That was a Shopping result, not an AI-search case study. The mechanism transfers: clearer structured data gives the machine a better product match.

Agentic discovery extends the same thesis.

A product the machine cannot classify accurately will not earn enough consideration to let the landing page do its job.