Google documented an official full-web search API and put it behind a partner door, which narrows the second of the two routes we have to AI Overviews data.

Google refreshed the overview page and four related pages for its Web Search Service API on 9 September. Every request needs a Google Cloud project, an API key, a client ID tied to a partner agreement, and the user's IP address. One primary method, Search, performs a "full web search" and returns JSON over REST or gRPC, up to 20 results per request and 10 by default. The documentation calls its audience "programmatic partners" and says nothing about how a company becomes one, what it costs, or what the query limits are. The backdrop is the Custom Search JSON API shutting down on 1 January 2027, which also catches Programmable Search Element users searching across more than 50 domains.

Site owners found several days of June 2026 missing from the page indexing report across all profiles. John Mueller, verbatim: "This is likely from the time in June where the data was delayed - there just isn't any data for that period, the page indexing report wasn't updated. We don't back-fill indexing data." Barry Schwartz's own wording is that he is "hoping it is just a reporting thing" and that he has seen "a lot of indexing complaints this month". Secondary coverage circulating today states this was confirmed as reporting-only with no cause for concern. No Google statement says that, so do not repeat it.

Method stated on the page: 687 Profound customers who tracked Shopping-triggering prompts every day in July, 1,757,723 prompt runs, range 1 July to 24 August 2026, with prompt-run sampling of 10% to 50% depending on the cut. On 10 July feed-integrated product recommendations went from 8.26% to 61.54%, which Profound calls "a ~6.5x increase in one day", and by 3 September feed retrieval was about 65% of tracked recommendations. Of the 687 customers, 450 lost at least a third of their Shopping visibility between 7 to 9 July and 10 to 12 July, while 67 gained by the same margin. Top-10 store references rose from 22.5% to 41.8% and unique merchants referenced fell from 13,524 to 10,607, over 20%. The timing lines up with GPT-5.6 on 9 July, which OpenAI has not confirmed as a shopping change. Profound's own hedge is that retailers with feed integration "cover both bases, when ChatGPT pulls from web search and its internal feed catalog", so web retrieval did not disappear.

Limits: these are prompt runs issued by a monitoring vendor, not sessions from real shoppers, and the whole finding is retail. Our ICP has no product feed.

Comparing January 2025 with a data set extending through August 2026. Impression share for one and two-word queries fell from 42% to 24%, and three and four-word queries rose from 33% to 48%. On conversion share, one and two-word queries fell from 62% to 52%, three and four-word queries went from 20% to 46%, five and six-word queries tripled from 3% to 9%, and seven-plus-word queries quadrupled from 1% to 4%.

Limits, and they are large: this is Google Ads paid search query data, not assistant prompts. The article states no account count, no spend, no impression total and no data provider. It is one practitioner's own pull, so treat the direction as real and the precise figures as indicative.