The opt-in just became an opt-out
On September 22, 2026, Shopify merchants received a short email from Google. It said: “Your Shopify store was matched to your Merchant Center, enabling native checkout on Google AI Mode and Gemini.” A second line removed any doubt about consent: eligible products on a published Shopify storefront are “automatically included.”
The rollout had started the previous Friday, September 18. That is the opposite of the process described in March, when merchants had to submit an interest form, add the native_commerce attribute, confirm Google Pay token support and wait for early access.
Why this matters for performance teams
For a D2C brand that earns on landing pages and cart work, this changes the economics before the click arrives. The buyer can transact on Google’s AI surface using stored Google Pay credentials, and the merchant receives an order instead of a session. Google gets the checkout, the payment path and the customer relationship; the store gets the sale record.
It also matters because AI Mode is no longer a small test. Shopping ads appeared inside AI Mode on February 11, 2026, when the surface was described as having passed 75 million daily active users.
What to check right now
If you want transactions on your own domain, the switch is not in Merchant Center. Google’s instruction points merchants to Shopify admin, under Sales channels and then Agentic, where native checkout has to be switched off manually.
- Open Shopify admin, then Sales channels and Agentic
- Confirm whether native checkout is on for your store
- Turn it off manually if you want the order and session on your site
The trust layer is tightening
Google also updated Merchant Center documentation with clearer ratings requirements about a week earlier. A store needs at least 100 eligible, unique reviews before a reliable rating can be calculated, an average composite score of at least 3.5 out of 5 for ratings to appear with paid ads, and a rolling 24-month window that discards older feedback. Ratings are geo-segmented, so reviews count only in the country where they came from. Anything below the threshold stops displaying until performance recovers.
That gives merchants a second reason to audit their AI Mode exposure now: default checkout plus stricter trust signals will reward prepared catalogues and quietly hide weak ones.
The regulatory collision is still pending
From September 27, under EU implementing regulation 2025/1960, EU sellers must display standardised legal guarantee notices in shops and online. That obligation assumes a page the shopper sees before buying. A native checkout inside a conversational answer does not obviously contain one. Because Google’s current rollout is United States-only, the conflict has been postponed rather than resolved.
Treat it as a new sales channel, not a setting
The practical framework is simple: audit it like a marketplace. Automatic enablement removes the merchant from the decision, but it does not remove accountability for product data, payment eligibility, ratings or customer service. If your Shopify catalog is matched and eligible, your products may already be purchasable inside AI Mode. Check before the next reporting cycle, not after.
The old queue was slow; the new default is fast. What changed is not the feature but who decides.
Source: PPC Land
