#BlinkTank: Google opens AI reporting in Search Console
I'm very aware that most weeks this newsletter is full of AI announcements that can be overwhelming and not all that useful in terms of what you can actually do right now.
The big story this week is more visible than abstract, though. Google has begun rolling out AI performance reporting in Search Console, so for the first time you can see how often your pages are showing up in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The more interesting part is the regulatory requirement that prompted it, which suggests this is moving in a direction that could end up forcing Google to show us a lot more than it ever has before.
Also in this issue: the May core update has finished, the Shopify Scripts switch-off is now three weeks away, there is a new open dataset showing how the web actually uses schema, Shopify makes its case against AI regulation, and the Amazon and Perplexity case reaches court this week. Plus the usual jobs and a couple of partner shout-outs.
On to the news.
Google's AI reporting arrives, but a UK regulator wrote the rules
On 3 June, Google began rolling out a Generative AI performance report in Search Console, showing how often your pages appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative features in Discover. It covers impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates. It does not include clicks, and it is going to a subset of UK site owners first before any wider rollout.
On its own that is not a surprise. We have said for a while that AI reporting would arrive eventually, and it is now turning up everywhere: GA4's AI Assistant channel last month, Shopify's agentic reporting dashboard, and now Search Console.
The part worth paying attention to is why the UK is first. Normally we are last in the queue for this sort of thing, watching the US get access months before anyone else, so a UK-first rollout is unusual enough to ask why.
The answer is that this is not Google choosing to be generous. It is the result of a conduct requirement issued by the Competition and Markets Authority under Google's strategic market status designation, which applies here and not in the US. The requirement asks for a good deal more than the report that launched this week: impressions and clicks, disaggregated from other search features, on a commonly available platform such as Search Console, with the AI clicks trackable so their quality can be assessed. The substantive obligations come into force on 3 December 2026.
That matters because of a problem we have talked about for years. Platform reporting has always been Google describing its own behaviour on its own terms, marking its own homework. A conduct requirement is different, because a regulator rather than Google sets the definition of what has to be disclosed. The report that launched this week is impressions-only, with none of the clicks data the CMA expects, so there is some way to go yet.
Whether it actually changes anything day to day, and what it looks like inside Search Console, we have no real idea yet. The CMA has said more is coming. I would not bank on us getting brilliant data out of it. But it could end up better than we would otherwise have expected, which on this stuff is not nothing.
🔗 Google: new controls and insights for website owners
🔗 CMA: fairer deal for publishers in Google search
Shopify makes its case against AI regulation
Meanwhile, with impeccable timing Shopify published a policy post this week arguing that governments should not write AI-specific laws. Instead, it said, they should update existing privacy, competition and consumer-protection rules where needed and lean on voluntary industry standards.
The framing, from VP of public affairs Alexandra Clark, is that every proposed AI law should be judged on one question: does it make it easier or harder to start a business. Shopify's case is that new compliance regimes fall hardest on the smallest operators, and it points to Sidekick usage up four times year-on-year, weighted towards merchants with the least to spend on alternatives, as evidence that the people most helped by AI are the ones a heavy regime would price out.
There is a reasonable version of that argument, particularly the point about overlapping national and regional regimes creating cost without adding much protection. It reads slightly differently this week, though. The story above is a case of regulation doing something squarely in merchants' interest, forcing a disclosure the platforms had no commercial reason to offer on their own. Voluntary standards are the same arrangement that has left us working with numbers the platforms define themselves. Worth reading the post and forming your own view, because the direction of AI regulation will shape the commerce surfaces you sell on.
🔗 Shopify: AI unlocks future-proof entrepreneurs. Bad regulation crushes them.
The May core update has finished
Google confirmed on 8 June that the May 2026 core update has finished rolling out, after a turbulent few weeks. Google described it as a regular update intended to better surface relevant, satisfying content from all types of sites.
Now that it is complete, this is the point to assess impact rather than during the rollout. The cleanest comparison in Search Console is the seven days before 21 May against the equivalent period now the update has settled, rather than anything measured against the volatile window in between. As ever, if you saw movement during the rollout, wait until things have settled before drawing conclusions or making changes.
🔗 Google Search Status Dashboard
Shopify Scripts stop running on 30 June
If your store still uses Shopify Scripts, the hard deadline is now three weeks away. Scripts stopped being editable on 15 April, and they stop executing entirely on 30 June. After that, anything still running on a Script simply stops working.
For large-catalogue stores this is worth a specific check, because Scripts are often doing important work that is not always visible: tiered or volume discounts, shipping-rate logic, and payment-method gating at checkout. If any of that is still on a Script rather than migrated to Shopify Functions or a public app, it will break at the end of the month.
🔗 Shopify: Shopify Functions and the Scripts migration
A new dataset shows how the web actually uses schema
On 4 June, the Schema.org community published a new open dataset, with data provided by Google, showing how widely each schema type and property is actually used across the web. The first release covers May 2026, and it will update monthly.
Rather than exact counts, it groups each term into buckets by how many distinct domains use it, from the core types found on more than ten million domains down to the rare ones seen on fewer than a thousand. The raw files are on the Schema.org GitHub in CSV and JSON, and the figures are also being shown directly on each schema term page, so when you look up a type you can see how widely it is adopted.
This is a useful reference point. However, it will not tell you what to implement, and adoption is not the same as ranking value, but it is a good signal of what is established versus niche, and a sanity check when you are deciding where to spend effort.
🔗 Schema.org: announcing the usage statistics dataset
The Amazon and Perplexity case reaches court this week
The world of agentic commerce has a legal test arriving this week. Oral arguments in Amazon's case against Perplexity are scheduled at the Ninth Circuit on 11 June. The dispute is over Perplexity's shopping agent making purchases on Amazon on a user's behalf, which Amazon has moved to block.
It is worth watching because it is the first significant test of whether a retailer can stop an AI agent transacting on its site, and the outcome matters for everyone building towards agent-led shopping. The pattern emerging so far is that the protocol-led, opt-in model, where a merchant chooses to expose itself to agents, looks more durable than agents acting without permission.
🔗 Background on the Amazon and Perplexity dispute
A free internal linking tool from the Blink team
Last week we shared Metafield Groups, the browser extension the Blink team built to make Shopify's metafield admin less of a mess of undifferentiated fields. The response was good, so here is another one solving a different Shopify annoyance: Blink Auto Link Manager.
Internal linking is something we have talked about here before, because it is one of the higher-impact things you can do on a large-catalogue store and one of the most neglected. The reason it gets ignored is that Shopify has no bulk find-and-replace in code. There is no native way to say "wherever this phrase appears, link it here" across a whole store, so it tends to get done page by page or not at all.
This is how we got round it. You define a rule once, mapping anchor text to a destination URL, and the store applies it wherever that phrase appears in your content without anyone touching the page. In practice you build a list of find-and-URL pairs, export it as JSON, and drop it into a shop metafield. A small Liquid snippet reads that and wraps every matching phrase in a link automatically.
Two details worth knowing. The rules apply longest phrase first, so "running shoes" wins over "shoes" rather than the short rule firing inside the long one. And anything already sitting inside a link gets skipped, so you do not end up with nested anchors.
🔗 Blink Auto Link Manager
Jobs
Hiring:
Danesmoor Group are hiring a Senior Digital & Ecommerce Manager. Danesmoor is a fifth-generation family-owned business spanning trade, retail, manufacturing and a European agency, kicking off a digital transformation programme across ecommerce, platforms, data and AI. The role owns trading on a major B2B platform with a clear path to Head of Digital.
Paolo Moschino Ltd are hiring a Digital Web & E-commerce Manager in Belgravia, London. An award-winning luxury interiors and design studio preparing to launch its Shopify store, after someone comfortable with Liquid, technical SEO and app integrations like Klaviyo. Full-time or part-time.
Zone3 are hiring an eCommerce Manager near Woking. A British triathlon and swim brand selling globally on Shopify Plus, with SEO and CRO at the centre of the role. It is a first manager-level role with room to grow into it, £38k to £42k, hybrid.
Looking for work:
Burhan Bakır is a Shopify specialist with over three years of hands-on experience, focused on execution. At his previous agency he managed seven to ten active storefronts at once and handled large catalogues at scale: SKU management, metafields, collection structure and filters. Open to new opportunities.
If you are hiring and the role fits someone with large-catalogue Shopify experience, or you are looking and have that background, send me a message.
Partner shout-outs
Two this week.
First up, Comtec Translations, who we got to know as a fellow winner at the National Digital Awards, where they took Best Use of AI (Agency Side). They are a UK translation and localisation agency, have been doing this for over 40 years, and I have been super impressed with them. The part relevant to this audience is the ecommerce side: website, product and marketing localisation done properly for each market rather than run through machine translation and left there. If you run a large catalogue and are expanding into new territories, getting the language and the structure right in each market is exactly the kind of foundational work that pays off, and they are good at it.
🔗 comtectranslations.co.uk
A newer one as well. I have been talking to Christian Umbach at Autopilot, a company focusing on Amazon optimisation. We work the discovery and structure problem on Shopify, they work the equivalent on Amazon, and there is a clear overlap in the kind of brand each of us is built for. If you run a large catalogue across both Shopify and Amazon and want an introduction, reply and I will make it.
🔗 autopilotbrand.com
As ever, thanks for reading.
If you found this useful, I would love it if you could share it with someone you think would find it interesting - whether that is someone managing a large-catalogue Shopify store or anyone else who follows this kind of thing.
See you next week.
Sam
Who am I and what does Blink do?
I'm Sam Wright, Managing Director and co-founder of Blink SEO. We're a search marketing agency that works exclusively with large-catalogue Shopify stores - the kind where the challenge isn't just visibility, but helping customers find the right product in the first place.
We specialise in SEO and PPC for merchants managing hundreds or thousands of products. Most of our work starts with taxonomy: how a store is structured and categorised, and what that means for organic performance, paid efficiency, and on-site discovery.
If you found this useful and aren't already subscribed, you can sign up at blinkseo.co.uk/blinktank.
If you run a large-catalogue Shopify store and want to talk about organic or paid performance, reply to this email or find me at blinkseo.co.uk.