Here’s what happened after August 24.

Have you opened your Google Merchant Center reports in recent days and stared at an unexplained drop in free traffic, while paid clicks illogically shot up? You don’t need to panic or search for a bug in your online store. On August 24, Google rolled out a major, across-the-board change in how it evaluates and displays data about your products.

Source: Google Merchant Center Help

Let’s objectively summarize exactly what happened in your accounts after this date.

Why are your reports in chaos and when did this actually take effect?

Google is finally unifying metrics across its entire ecosystem – from Merchant Center through Google Ads to YouTube. The goal is to unify the view of performance and eliminate discrepancies in measurement.

  • The changes went live on August 24, 2026.
  • Watch out for historical data: Google also applied these changes retroactively. You will see the adjusted numbers on all data starting from July 1, 2026.

Why did you experience a drop in organic traffic?

Two specific video-related adjustments are behind the decline in organic metrics in your reports:

  1. Cutting off YouTube Affiliate from organic:
    Until now, everything was thrown into one “free” bucket. Under the new system, traffic from products where YouTube creators can earn a commission has been completely separated into its own category called “YouTube affiliate.” These clicks have therefore permanently disappeared from the organic column. This caused that one-time, yet for many noticeable, drop in organic traffic in the reports, even though the actual number of visitors remained de facto the same.
  2. A new definition of YouTube organic:
    Until recently, Merchant Center measured free clicks slightly differently than YouTube itself. Now, these definitions have been strictly aligned with established standards. This administrative adjustment also carved away a chunk of your reported organic numbers.

Why did your ad numbers increase, on the other hand?

While organic metrics were purged and dropped after August 24, paid metrics in Merchant Center experienced the exact opposite effect.

All advertising channels are now in one place: Product-level reporting in Merchant Center has massively expanded. Until now, you didn’t see the full picture here. Now, data from all networks within Performance Max campaigns flows here, as well as metrics from Video, App, and Demand Gen campaigns.

The result? You see a sudden spike in impressions, clicks, and other metrics. The reason isn’t that your ads are suddenly performing better, but the fact that Merchant Center is finally aggregating data from all existing Google Ads formats into one central report.

What still lies ahead (“Network” Dimension)

Google has already announced another new feature that will be added soon. It plans to introduce the ability to segment performance by the “Network” dimension in Merchant Center-exactly what we are used to directly in Google Ads. This will allow you to more easily and accurately compare which specific channels within the Google network are actually driving the best performance for you.