Google Shopping feed requirements
Google’s product data specification is long, and only part of it is mandatory. The distinction worth learning is between the attributes that decide whether an item is accepted and the attributes that decide whether it is ever shown.
The attributes that decide acceptance
These are required for essentially every item. A product missing one of them is not a weak listing; it is not a listing.
| Attribute | What it has to be |
|---|---|
| id | Unique and stable. Changing it creates a new product and loses history. |
| title | What the product is, in the words a buyer would use. |
| description | The product, not your shipping policy. |
| link | The product page, on a verified and claimed domain. |
| image_link | The main image, meeting the image rules below. |
| availability | in stock, out of stock, preorder or backorder. |
| price | Matching the price on the landing page, including currency. |
| brand | Required for most categories. |
| gtin or mpn | A GTIN where one exists; MPN plus brand where it does not. |
| condition | Required when the item is not new. |
The attributes that decide whether you are shown
Optional in the specification, decisive in the auction. Every one of these gives Google another way to match your product to a query, and several are used to filter results. A buyer narrowing to "blue, size 42" removes every item that never declared a colour or a size.
- google_product_category and product_type: the first tells Google where the item sits in its taxonomy, the second tells it where the item sits in yours.
- colour, size, material, pattern, age group and gender: required for apparel, and used as filters across categories.
- additional_image_link: more angles, which reliably lifts click-through.
- shipping and tax: accurate values prevent the mismatch disapprovals below.
- sale_price and sale_price_effective_date: how a promotion is expressed without breaking price consistency.
- item_group_id: what ties variants of the same product together.
Images
Google’s image rules are stricter than most feeds assume. The main image has to show the product on its own, without promotional overlays, watermarks, borders or text burned into it, and without placeholder or generic graphics. Minimum sizes are 100 by 100 pixels for non-apparel and 250 by 250 for apparel, but those are floors rather than targets: the surfaces render large, and a small image looks like a small business.
The no-watermark rule is about visible marks on the image. It does not conflict with the machine-readable provenance metadata the EU AI Act asks for on generated images. That marking is invisible and lives in the file, not on the picture.
Why items get disapproved
- Price or availability mismatch between the feed and the landing page. The most common disapproval by a wide margin, and usually a crawl-timing problem rather than a data problem.
- Missing or invalid GTIN, where the category expects one.
- Image problems: overlays, watermarks, images that are too small, or a link that does not resolve.
- Landing page problems: a page that 404s, redirects to a category, or is blocked from Google’s crawler.
- Policy categories: restricted or prohibited products, which no feed fix resolves.
- Missing required attributes for the item’s category, especially in apparel.
None of these are affected by which CSS submits the item. A disapproved product is disapproved everywhere, which is worth saying because it is a common misunderstanding when a merchant switches.