Follow Merchant Center product-data, eligibility and reporting updates, with credited sources and practical retailer context.
Google Merchant Center
Merchant Centre has introduced rolling out Business Agent in early access, an AI agent that helps your business on Google by answering shopper questions and recommending products customised to match your brand and is rolling out to select accounts.
Google Merchant Center
Google will consolidate its Shopping ads and free listings policies into one unified set on September 2, standardising requirements across paid and unpaid product surfaces.
Google Merchant Center
Merchant Centre Promotions now lets you choose placements across Shopping ads, free listings, Chrome, and, newly, Google Wallet in the Physical Stores. Businesses with physical stores can also run promotions through Local Inventory Ads, free local listings, and Wallet.
Google Merchant Center
Select Merchant Centre accounts now show an AI performance report inside Analytics, surfacing AI Mode and AI Overviews data for your products. Metrics include query groups users type into AI search, share of voice for those terms, term popularity, and popular product attributes, following help documentation first spotted by Hana Kobzová and interface digging by Brodie Clark.
Google Ads
Google has published an AI-labelling update, effective July 2026, that lets advertisers add text or visual labels to AI-generated or modified image and video creative, with optional automatic labelling for Google AI assets. The labels do not breach overlay or watermark rules and roll out across Google Ads, Display & Video 360, Campaign Manager 360, Merchant Centre, and Ads Editor, in line with EU, India, and New York disclosure requirements.
Google Merchant Center
Google has begun serving ads in AI Mode, with five formats now appearing: standard text ads, Shopping ads placed inline with organic results, and a product grid format. The rollout follows the formats Google previewed at Google Marketing Live.
Google Merchant Center
Khushal Bherwani has flagged Google testing a 3D product view that animates the product and returns it to its original position as the user scrolls. It adds motion to the product presentation in the results.
Google Merchant Center
Google is dropping the "Next" name, so the platform you use today is now simply Google Merchant Centre. The change covers documentation, emails, and the interface, and rolls out over several weeks.
Google Merchant Center
Emmanuel Flossie has flagged that Google Shopping checkout links are now available in Indonesia, France, Mexico, Argentina, Israel, and Australia. The links send ready-to-buy shoppers straight to your cart or checkout on mobile and tablet devices, rather than to the product page.
Google Merchant Center
Google Ads now enables Customer Match list uploads through Merchant Centre, reported by PPC News Feed. Retailers can manage match audiences where their product data already lives.
Industry
Ruben Runneboom has shared two feed-management pointers for Google Merchant Centre. He calls the relatively new popularity_rank attribute one of the most interesting Merchant Centre additions in years, since it lets advertisers send Google a much stronger signal about which products matter most.
Google Merchant Center
Bia Camargo has flagged a Google Merchant Centre API issue delaying product submissions and feed updates across integrations. Feeds that suddenly stop updating may be affected by a platform-side issue rather than an advertiser's own setup, leaving teams refreshing diagnostics while submissions lag.
Google Merchant Center
A widespread Shopify outage caused a significant wave of "product page unavailable" disapprovals across Google Merchant Centre, flagged by Chelsea Harding, Barry Schwartz, Catalina Koop, and Shivam Pandey. Google's crawler interpreted store pages as down during the incident and disapproved products even where the landing pages were live and loading correctly when tested manually.
Google Merchant Center
VIVEK GUPTA has flagged that Google has announced 18 August 2026 as the final date for migrating Google Merchant Centre integrations to the Merchant API. The Merchant API is becoming the future direction for product data management and integrations within Google's ecosystem, replacing the legacy Content API workflow.
Google Merchant Center
Google's AI shopping insights report: the Merchant Centre reporting suite previewed at GML: is now rolling out, flagged by Arpan Banerjee. The report shows a brand's share of voice on AI surfaces against similar brands across AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Gemini, a shopping funnel breakdown spanning discovery, evaluation, and purchase, product term insights revealing which terms shoppers use in AI conversations and the brand's share of voice for each, and an attribute completeness score that pinpoints which products are missing the specs AI surfaces look for.
Google Merchant Center
The Gemini-powered Business Agent previewed at GML is now live for eligible merchants, flagged by Khushboo Aulakh. The agent sits on a brand's profile in search results and answers product questions in the brand's voice before a customer clicks through: handling queries such as sizing or quantity calculations that would otherwise reach the customer service team.
Industry
Ask Advisor is being unified across Google's marketing surfaces: Google Ads, Google Analytics, Merchant Centre, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, Campaign Manager 360, and soon more: into a single agentic experience that travels with the user across products. The unified advisor remembers business goals and context, surfaces the right product for each conversation, and proactively suggests next steps.
Google Merchant Center
Conversational Attributes are a new set of Merchant Centre product data fields designed specifically for discovery in AI Mode and conversational commerce surfaces. The new attributes include Question & Answer, Additional Variants, Popularity Rank, Related Products, Document Link, and Item Group.
Google Ads
Product videos at scale eliminate the previous 5-video upload limit, enabling Demand Gen campaigns to leverage the entire Google Merchant Centre video library. The system dynamically serves product-specific videos based on real-time user intent and interest, reducing creative overhead and improving relevance through AI-driven video-to-user matching.
Gemini
Asset Studio is launching as the centralised creative hub inside Google Ads: bringing existing brand assets together, generating new creative with Google AI, and enabling one-click testing. The 2026 expansion includes four structural additions: Brand Guidelines (PDF Upload): upload free-form marketing briefs and PDFs to act as a permanent anchor for the brand's style, colour, and business info; Google Assets ingestion from Merchant Center, YouTube Studio, and Pomelli; Third-Party Assets integration with Adobe and Canva via the Google Ads API; and Asset Generation in the Google Ads API for programmatic integration into custom campaign platforms.
Google Merchant Center
UCP setup in Microsoft Merchant Centre enables merchants to add new store settings and product feed attributes to activate AI-powered shopping experiences in Copilot. Two-part setup: (1) update store settings (Return policy, Customer support) and product feed attributes in Merchant Centre; (2) set up checkout APIs for Copilot Checkout (closed pilot).
Google Merchant Center
Ask Advisor in Merchant Centre launched in closed beta in the US in English: a Gemini-powered conversational assistant that diagnoses account and feed issues, surfaces performance and audience insights, and provides a roadmap to improve Store Quality Score. The advisor offers performance reporting and insights tailored to business goals, product listing and issue-resolution guidance for disapprovals, and personalised, actionable recommendations such as promotion opportunities or title optimisations.
Google Merchant Center
AI Performance Insights is a new Merchant Centre reporting suite that shows how products are being discovered on AI Mode, Gemini, and AI Overviews. The reporting includes brand Share of Voice vs. similar brands, journey-stage breakdown (discovery, evaluation, purchase), product term popularity, and structured attribute completeness scoring.
Google Merchant Center
Marcin Wsól has surfaced an upcoming Google Ads change: Google will automatically link Google Ads accounts to Merchant Center for advertisers running Shopping campaigns or product-feed-driven inventory. The auto-link enables product data and conversion flow between the two platforms, using the same mechanics as the YouTube auto-linking covered above.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre has announced that Merchant Centre for Agencies is now generally available globally as of 11 May 2026. The product was previously generally available in the US and Canada with a pilot in other markets through March 2026; the May rollout extends full GA worldwide.
Google Merchant Center
Barry Schwartz has flagged that Google is testing Merchant Advisor: a Merchant Centre equivalent to Google Ads Advisor, originally spotted by Tamara Hellgren on Momentic and surfaced by Hana Kobzová in her weekly digest. The product mirrors Ads Advisor's design pattern: in-context AI assistance for diagnosing feed issues, troubleshooting disapprovals, surfacing optimisation opportunities, and answering platform questions through natural-language interaction with the Gemini-powered Advisor.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre has documented a new agency account conversion request workflow, giving agencies a structured path to convert legacy Merchant Centre accounts into the unified agency account model. The workflow lets agencies submit conversion requests for client accounts they manage, and Google reviews and processes each request to align the account with the current agency account architecture.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre has confirmed that vehicle ads in the United States are expanding to support All-Terrain Vehicles (ATVs), Utility Task Vehicles (UTVs), Recreational Vehicles (RVs), and non-motorised trailers such as travel trailers and campers, starting May 2026. The expansion extends Google's lower-funnel, omnichannel vehicle ad format beyond traditional automobiles into the broader powersports and recreational-vehicle category.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre has rolled out a new product source option: Use AI to add products (currently in beta): that lets Google's AI automatically scan an advertiser's website and populate the product catalogue without manual feed files or API integration. Arpan Banerjee has flagged the launch (sourced from Barry Schwartz); the option appears in Merchant Centre's Add Product Source flow alongside the existing "Add products from a file" and "Use Google Sheets" routes.
Google Merchant Center
Google has rolled out shopping checkout buttons in Google Search results: the first native checkout shopping experience in Search since the original "Buy on Google" surface was killed in 2023. Juozas Kaziukėnas has flagged the launch and traced its mechanics: the checkout flow is powered by Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), the same payment infrastructure that has been running in Gemini and AI Mode for the past two months.
