Google holiday commerce updates: what is open to a Saudi store?

For a Saudi store, one layer of Google's holiday updates is open: your product data. On 16 September 2026, Google announced four agentic commerce updates ahead of the holiday season. Agentic commerce means features where Google's AI helps shoppers find, compare and buy products. Three of the four are limited to country lists that include neither Saudi Arabia nor any Gulf state. That comes from the text of Google's own help pages. The fourth is open to you today, with no waiting.

What did Google announce for the holidays, and what is open to a Saudi store?

One of the four is open: the attributes you add to your product feed in Merchant Center. The product feed is the file that lists your products and their details for Google. The other three are closed by geography. They are the performance report for AI answers, the conversational agent inside YouTube ads, and the UCP direct checkout platform. Each restriction is written on an official page. None of them is inferred from an absence.

The AI performance insights report measures your share of visibility against competitors in AI Mode and AI Overviews. Google's page says it is available to Merchant Center accounts in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the United States. It adds a second limit: English queries only. So the restriction here is double, a country and a language.

The conversational agent inside YouTube ads lets a viewer ask about the product without leaving the video. Google's announcement says it opened as a trial for merchants in the United States only. UCP is a standard for direct checkout inside AI results. Its page says it is rolling out gradually in the United States, with Australia and Canada following next year.

The fourth stays open: product feed attributes. Google names the video link attribute, video_link, and the conversational attributes. These are six optional attributes, and the main one is question_and_answer. Neither attribute's page lists any countries. Google says merchants who apply the core feed best practices see, on average, a 5% increase in conversions the following month.

What is different for a Saudi account?

The difference is that the only layer open to you is the slowest to show up in your ads dashboard. Conversational attributes cost no budget. They need no approval and have no waiting list. But they work inside AI answers, the very space whose report is closed to you. So you add data and have no counter to measure it.

A second difference sits in the loyalty program Google invited merchants to connect. Its page limits it to 13 countries. Neither Saudi Arabia nor any Gulf state is among them. The same page says loyalty benefits appear in AI Mode and the Gemini apps in the United States only. The invitation you are reading is not addressed to you.

A third difference is practical. A store here usually runs on a ready-made platform that generates the product feed automatically. Its dashboard has no field for a new attribute. Google recommends adding these attributes through a supplemental data source. That is a second file that adds columns to your original feed without changing it. This route is open to you whatever your platform.

When does this not work?

It does not work if you expect to read its impact in your ads dashboard. Google states that the AI answers performance report covers free traffic only. Paid ad traffic is not included. It is a free visibility report, not a campaign report, even in the five countries where it is open.

A second limit sits in the number itself. The 5% lift is an average across merchants who applied the core best practices. Google did not publish the sample size, the period or the sectors. Nor did it attribute the lift to conversational attributes or to the video link. It attributed it to core feed practices. So do not build a forecast for your store on it. I wrote about the risk of forecasting from a general number in an earlier piece on Google's targets.

A third limit is in the example Google chose. Google said a test with lululemon placed the brand's conversational attributes in related product recommendations inside AI Mode half the time. That is a test with one large brand in an English-language market. It is not a rule that applies to a Saudi perfume store.

A fourth limit is technical and concerns video. Google requires a video between 6 and 240 seconds long, at 720p or higher, and under 500 MB. The aspect ratio must be 9:16, 16:9 or 1:1. A video shorter than six seconds will not show, however good it is.

The test I run

When a Saudi store reads Google's holiday announcement, I do not start with what is closed. I open the product feed and pick the 20 best-selling products. Then I add the question and answer attribute to 10 of them. That means the questions buyers ask most often, with their answers, written into the product data itself.

I leave the other 10 as they are, with nothing added. I add the attributes through a supplemental file, not inside the original feed. That way I can pull them out in a minute if results drop. Then I wait a full month and compare sales across the two groups.

I compare inside one account because Google's report on visibility in AI answers is closed to Saudi Arabia. A store that adds attributes to all its products at once will not know which ones helped. It will repeat the same work next season with no evidence.

Frequently asked questions

Is the AI performance insights report available to a Saudi store?

No. Google states that it is available to Merchant Center accounts in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the United States, and for English queries only. Saudi Arabia is outside the country list, and Arabic is outside the language list. Opening the country later would not open the language with it.

Do conversational attributes affect my products' approval status?

No. Google states that adding them does not affect the approval status of your existing products, and that they are fully optional. It recommends adding them through a supplemental data source. That is a separate file that adds columns to your original feed without touching it.

Should I repeat my product description inside the conversational attributes?

No. Google states that you do not need to repeat what you already sent in the description, in product_highlight or in product_detail. Details of the accounts I manage are on the work page.