On 21 August 2026, Google sent advertisers its “AI-powered” holiday season guide (official Think with Google page), which claims more than 2.5 billion monthly users for AI Overviews and a drop in ChatGPT usage among shoppers who also use AI Mode (PPC Land). For retailers closing their Q4 budget, these figures weigh as heavily on the choice of platforms as on a less spectacular prerequisite: the state of their product feeds.
The facts
- The document “Supercharge your business this season: The retail marketers' guide to the AI-powered holiday season 2026”, co-signed with YouTube and presented on a Think with Google page dated August 2026, was sent to advertisers on Friday 21 August under the subject line “Lead the AI-driven holiday shift” (PPC Land). It is structured around four consumer shifts, four product workstreams and three case studies.
- The official page claims more than 2.5 billion monthly users for AI Overviews and more than 1 billion for AI Mode, a figure announced at Google I/O 2026 (Think with Google). According to Ipsos surveys commissioned by Google, 61% of 2025 holiday shoppers used AI features and 64% would have liked to use them more.
- Still according to the guide, 40% of consumers who use AI Mode for their shopping say they use ChatGPT less. The base: 9,347 online shoppers who use both products, so a finding about dual users only, which says nothing about the market as a whole.
Why is Google publishing these figures now?
The timing is not neutral. The guide goes out just as retailers finalise their Q4 decisions, in a sector watching the rise of AI assistants in product search. The figure of 2.5 billion monthly users sets the scale of the subject. The ChatGPT decline comes from surveys Google commissioned among its own dual users, and it does not appear on the public presentation page: you have to download the full guide, behind a form, to find it. PPC Land also notes that some claims in the document do not always match the footnotes meant to support them, and that the three featured case studies, including Etsy and its 36% rise in holiday sales, state neither a measurement window nor an incrementality method. The playbook remains a Google guidance document about Google's own products, distinct from an independent study.
For a business selling online, the Google-versus-ChatGPT duel matters less than the order of the four recommended workstreams: structuring product feeds for the Shopping Graph (titles, visuals, delivery times, return policies, conversational attributes), strengthening first-party data (Google tag gateway, Data Manager, basket data), activating AI-driven campaigns and preparing agentic checkout infrastructure. The order makes sense: a poorly structured product feed in Merchant Center already limits the effectiveness of Performance Max, before any question of agentic infrastructure arises. Checking product data quality, titles, attributes and catalogue coverage remains the prerequisite for any AI-driven campaign, whatever the real weight of the ChatGPT decline.
AIxH's view
This kind of playbook deserves to be read with the same method as an internal report: keep the strategic direction, set aside the figures that cannot be verified as they stand. In the audits run by our digital advertising agency in Luxembourg, the priority has been the same for several holiday seasons: clean, complete data before any AI-driven campaign is activated. It is less spectacular work than a 2.5 billion figure, and it is what determines the real performance of Performance Max over the quarter. If you are preparing your Q4 budget, a product feed audit before activating AI features quickly identifies the blocking points.