Your Merchant Center numbers moved on their own last week

Google changed what counts as organic and what counts as ads on 24 August. Organic will look worse, ads will look better, and neither is a real change in the business.

What actually changed

On 24 August Google changed how Merchant Center counts performance. YouTube affiliate traffic, where a creator earns a commission, is now separated out from organic. YouTube click and impression definitions were aligned with YouTube's own. Product level reporting was widened to take in every ads channel, including Performance Max, Video, App and Demand Gen. A Network dimension is coming after that, which will let you split performance by channel the way Google Ads already does.

Why your organic suddenly looks worse

Two of those changes pull traffic out of the organic column. Affiliate traffic that used to sit inside your organic numbers now sits on its own, so organic falls without a single customer going anywhere. At the same time the ads column takes in channels that were not reported at product level before, so ads performance rises for the same kind of reason. Put the two side by side and the gap has widened on paper and not in the business.

The part most people miss

Only two of the changes were applied backwards, and only as far as 1 July. Your history is now restated for part of the period and left alone for the rest. Any comparison that crosses that line is comparing two different definitions, which bites hardest for the people who look at these numbers least often. That means the quarterly review, the year on year slide and the board pack, rather than whoever is in the account every day.

I check these against the original source before publishing, and I will send you the source if you want to see it. I do not quote a number I have not read myself.