What Are Google AI Overviews and How Do You Optimise for Them?
Google cites pages in AI Overviews, and what gets cited is not always what ranks. Here is how to be the source it quotes.
Ecommerce PPC starts
with the feed.
For an online store, the product feed decides what you are eligible to show for and which queries you match. We fix that before we touch bidding, then run Shopping, Performance Max and paid search as one account, measured against what each order is worth to you.
What that has looked like
Specialist retail, a wide range, and demand spread across many specific product searches. What an account can do depends on your margins, your range and where you start – so we show the work in full, not an average.
What we actually work on
The feed and the campaigns handled by one team – whether you run Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento or a custom build.
Get a free auditThe title is the closest thing Shopping has to a keyword, and the pattern that works is rarely the one your catalogue exports by default. We rebuild titles around brand, product type and the attributes buyers actually type, in the order that matches the query rather than the order that suits your internal naming. The same product data decides how your product pages are understood, so this overlaps with ecommerce SEO more than people expect.
Product identifiers, brand, product type, the assigned Google category, condition, availability, price, shipping and returns data. Missing or wrong values do not produce an error you notice – they produce silence in a surface you never knew you were excluded from.
Disapprovals cleared and the underlying cause fixed rather than the symptom, price and availability mismatches between the feed and the live page resolved, and monitoring so the next batch of disapprovals is noticed by us rather than by your month-end report.
Labels for margin band, seasonality, stock depth, bestseller status and clearance, so the account can bid differently on a product you make money on than on one you do not. One product presented once, properly, rather than fourteen near-identical entries splitting their own performance data.
Structured around the commercial reality of the catalogue rather than around its menu structure. Products grouped so that bids reflect margin and demand, search terms reviewed and excluded continuously, and the parts of the range that deserve their own budget separated from the parts that do not.
Powerful, and deliberately hard to see inside. We run it with the controls that do still exist: asset groups split by margin and intent, exclusions that stop it billing you for people who were coming to you by name anyway, and enough reporting structure that you can tell what it is actually buying. Where the account is small or the data is thin, we will say so and run something simpler.
Shopping shows the product; search catches the problem, the comparison and the specific model, and it is where you control the wording. Both run in one account with one negative keyword discipline, so they stop bidding against each other on the same query. Remarketing is capped and segmented by how close someone got, and where you have first-party customer data we set it up so the account can tell a new customer from a returning one.
Conversions built natively in the ad platform rather than imported, carrying the real value of each basket, so the bidding learns from the difference between a small order and a large one. Reporting is monthly, in plain English, and leads with orders, order value and cost per acquisition.
Most Shopping problems are not campaign problems.
There are no keywords in Shopping. What you show up for is decided by your product data, which means the feed is doing the job a keyword list does everywhere else in paid search. So when a campaign underperforms, the first place to look is rarely the bid.
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Titles written for your catalogue, not the query
Critical. The title is the closest thing Shopping has to a keyword. When it carries your internal product naming instead of the words buyers type, the product is never matched to the searches it should be winning – and no amount of bidding fixes that.
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Every product bid as if it were worth the same
High. Without custom labels for margin, seasonality and stock depth, the account treats a thin-margin product exactly like your most profitable one. It will happily buy more of the wrong orders, and the headline number can look fine while contribution does not.
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Missing attributes and unread disapprovals
Critical. A missing identifier, a wrong category assignment or a price that does not match the live page can exclude a product from an entire surface. It does not arrive as an error you notice; it arrives as silence, usually long before anyone goes looking.
AI at catalogue scale. People at the wheel.
A catalogue has too many products to review by hand. AI lets us check titles and attributes across thousands of products, find the duplicates and flag the ones quietly excluded from a surface, in a fraction of the time. But which products get prioritised, how the account is structured and what we actually bid on – our specialists decide that. AI produces the groundwork; a person makes the call.
Sunbird’s paid search team
Senior paid search specialists – the same people over time, and Nils runs your account day to day. Backed by developers, analysts and SEO specialists when a job calls for it.
Find out what your product data is costing you
The first step is a free audit with Nils. It takes 30 minutes and you do not need to prepare anything.
Here is what you walk away with:
- Where your account is wasting spend today
- What your catalogue is and is not eligible to show for
- Whether your tracking carries the real value of each order
- A concrete plan for what we would fix first, and in what order
“We have been pleased with their long-term support and their ability to deliver both in the short and the long run. A reliable and capable web agency that we are happy to recommend.”Fagerdesign
You speak directly to Nils
No salespeople. You speak directly to Nils, with 14 years in search behind him. Call, email or book 30 minutes.
Nils Fridlund
Ownership, not lock-in
Our fee is a fixed line agreed in advance, separate from your media budget, so recommending that you spend less costs us nothing. Google Ads, Merchant Center and the feed configuration stay in your name from day one – if we part company, nothing is switched off or withheld. And the first three months are a trial you can end at any point, with no minimum term after it. You stay because the account is working, not because a contract says you have to.
