Courtney Rose, VP of Retail at Google Ads, told Modern Retail at Shoptalk Spring that enabling AI Max lifted Aritzia’s revenue by 80%. No timeframe, no baseline. No Aritzia executive. A vendor, in an interview chair, was crediting its own tool.

The timing is the story. Retail boards began demanding proof of AI results at the very conference where Google offered this one. A board seeking comfort has a data point; a board seeking evidence has a press clipping. The two boards will not notice the difference until the next fiscal year.

The seller is grading the seller’s work.

Aritzia’s audited figures are the useful counterweight. eCommerce net revenue rose 42.4% year on year in Q4 FY2025, carried by U.S. boutique expansion and a larger digital budget. Wherever the 80% lives, it does not live on the income statement.

The mechanism matters. AI Max scans the advertiser’s catalogue, matches creative to conversational queries, and attributes the resulting sales through Google’s own attribution model. The cell is chosen, the counterfactual is modelled, the lift is declared. What Google is selling is the matcher; what Google is measuring is the match.

The tolerable reading is that AI Max lifts attribution for accounts that had concentrated their spend on narrow search terms, and that Aritzia was such an account. The pattern is familiar: advertisers arriving late to any tool tend to post the largest percentage gains, for reasons that belong to the advertiser rather than the tool. The 80% may be true of the cell Google measured. It is not, on the available evidence, true of Aritzia.

The question for Monday’s board meeting is not whether the 80% is real. It is how many directors, flipping to this page of the procurement file, will notice that the only witness in the room is the defendant.