Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Topic · Structured data and media
Google said shopping is where structured data's precision matters most: LLM extraction gets complex pricing such as sale prices wrong, and markup stops its systems from picking up prices of related products (said at the event, not in Google's docs). In 2025 Google added structured data support for merchant loyalty programs and shipping policies, set at organisation level with product-level details. On stage, validity dates for sale prices were presented as new support added in the months before the event, so merchants need not rush to remove a sale price when a sale ends; Google's documentation updates log calls the July 2026 change a clarification, a Sale duration section explaining validFrom with validThrough or priceValidUntil, aligned with Merchant Center's sale_price_effective_date. Google's guide to pausing an online business recommends staying online and updating Product markup to show current availability. Day 3 brought the promised shopping detail: product rich results and Google Images product annotations come from product structured data without Merchant Center, while the Shopping tab needs a Merchant Center feed; product snippets draw on both, Google's documentation recommends feed and markup together for the widest eligibility, and Merchant Center can use the markup to fix mismatched feed data. Basic product markup has product data (name, description, brand, images) and offer data (URL, condition, availability, price), and an offer can reference shipping and return policies defined once under Organization through @id, as Google's merchant listing documentation recommends. Google Shopping said most of its new conversational attributes can also be read from schema.org markup, and schema.org added properties such as specification and valueGroup in September 2026, but Google's documentation did not cover this markup on 3 October 2026, so the feed is the documented route. Google's merchant listing documentation lists the product name as a required property and, unlike product snippets, requires a price greater than zero for merchant listing experiences; a Day 1 community demo's test page was flagged for an empty name and a price of zero.
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Google's merchant listing documentation lists the product name as a required property and, unlike product snippets, requires a price greater than zero for merchant listing experiences.
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 1, 13:10 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-08
Google's shopping structured data launches of the previous year (2025) added support for merchant loyalty programs and shipping policies, letting merchants define a policy at organisation level and specify details at product level.
Speaker Ryan LeveringIn Day 2, 13:35 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.Evidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-09
Google's structured data speaker said that in the months before the event Google added support for validity dates on sale prices in product structured data, so merchants no longer need to rush to remove a sale price when the sale ends for fear it shows wrongly in snippets.
Speaker Ryan LeveringIn Day 2, 13:35 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.Evidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-08
More shopping structured data news was left for a Day 3 talk by a Google colleague, Alex.
Speaker Ryan LeveringIn Day 2, 13:35 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.Evidence transcript
Google's guide to temporarily pausing an online business recommends that a shop expecting to sell again within weeks or months stays online with limited functionality, such as a disabled cart, and updates its Product structured data to show current availability.
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 2, 10:15 · Welcome to indexing day!
Used byrequirements DEV-ERR-04, DEV-SDA-08, DEV-SRV-03
Google's documentation updates log calls the July 2026 sale price change a clarification: a new Sale duration section of the merchant listing guide explains validFrom with validThrough or priceValidUntil, aligned with Merchant Center's sale_price_effective_date attribute.
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 2, 13:35 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-08
Google's merchant listing guide says Product rich results only support pages that focus on a single product, or on several variants of the same product.
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 2, 13:35 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-07
Google's merchant listing guide warns that a listing may not display if its priceValidUntil property indicates a past date.
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 2, 13:35 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-08
On product pages with related-product or recently-viewed carousels, make sure the Product markup describes only the main item and its price; Google's own example of what markup prevents was pulling a price from related products.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 13:35 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-07
For time-limited sales, give the sale price its validity dates in the product markup (Google's merchant listing documentation describes validFrom, validThrough and priceValidUntil) instead of editing markup by hand when the sale ends, and keep the dates aligned with the Merchant Center feed.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 2, 13:35 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-08
Google called product rich results essential for any e-commerce business; they can show the product's rating, the number of reviews and other details.
Speaker Gary IllyesIn Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are bornEvidence transcript
Google Search displays product rich results from product structured data; it may also use the product data a merchant provides in Google Merchant Center, but Merchant Center is not required for them.
Speaker Gary IllyesIn Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are bornEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01glossary term Merchant Center
Product annotations on Google Images results also come from product structured data and do not need Google Merchant Center.
Speaker Gary IllyesIn Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are bornEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
To appear in the Shopping tab of Google Search, a product must be submitted in Google Merchant Center; product structured data alone is not enough.
Speaker Gary IllyesIn Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are bornEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01glossary term Merchant Center
Product structured data can help Merchant Center in some cases, for example during data validation, but Merchant Center does not require it.
Speaker Gary IllyesIn Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are bornEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
Schema.org product markup on websites is another source of billions of product offers for Google Shopping, next to merchant feeds.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Product snippets in Google Search are powered by both shopping feeds and schema.org structured data.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
Traditional shopping results use a small set of well-defined attributes because they take little screen space: title, image, price, perhaps star ratings, shipping cost and time, and return information; in the past that was sufficient.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Most of the new conversational feed attributes were already available in schema.org, so Google ties them back to structured data and can use them from product markup as well as from feeds.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-04
Basic product markup has two parts: product data that is the same for every merchant (name, description, brand, images) and offer data specific to one merchant's offer (URL, condition, availability, price).
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
In product markup, an offer's shipping and return information can point through a JSON-LD identifier (@id) to shipping and return data defined elsewhere.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-09
A recent schema.org release added two properties, specification and valueGroup, so that the Merchant Center product detail attribute can be expressed in schema.org, with product specs nested under specification.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-04
Rich, lightly structured information is critical to AI systems: product data with many levels of nesting is not needed, but some structure is very important.
“rich, lightly structured information is critical to AI systems.”
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Basic, well-specified product attributes such as price, brand and availability remain as important as ever for Google Shopping.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
Rich, less structured product data that is not prescribed by Google, schema.org or any feed or data model is increasingly important, because the merchant or brand knows best what to provide.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Web markup is an efficient and unambiguous way for sites to share product data with Google, Google Shopping said, repeating the Day 2 structured data talk.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Google Shopping named the downside of adding Q&As and documentation to product markup: the page's markup becomes somewhat bigger.
Speaker Alex JansenIn Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue linksEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-04
Google's Product structured data introduction says that providing both on-page structured data and a Merchant Center feed maximizes eligibility for shopping experiences and helps Google understand and verify the data; product snippets may take pricing from the feed when the markup lacks it.
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are born
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
Google's Merchant Center help says products and details crawled from an online store can show up on Google even when they are not marked up with schema.org or added in Merchant Center, and lists the Shopping tab among the places Merchant Center free listings appear.
Publisher Google Merchant Center HelpAnnotates Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are born
Merchant Center's automatic item updates use structured data and other product data found on landing pages to fix price, sale price, availability and condition mismatches in a merchant's product data; Google says they do not replace regular feed updates.
Publisher Google Merchant Center HelpAnnotates Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are born
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
Google's merchant listing documentation recommends defining shipping and return policies once under Organization markup and referencing them from an Offer, even on another page, using only the @id keyword (through hasShippingService for shipping, hasMerchantReturnPolicy for returns).
Publisher Google Search CentralAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-09
Google's free listings help says crawled store products can appear on Google without markup or Merchant Center but does not say whether that includes the Shopping tab; for a shop that wants Shopping tab visibility, the stage rule that Merchant Center is required is the safe working assumption.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are born
For an online shop, Product structured data is enough for product rich results and Google Images product annotations, but the Shopping tab needs a Merchant Center feed too; keep feed and markup values identical, since Google can use the markup to validate the feed.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:25 · How Search results are born
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-01
As of 3 October 2026 Google's Merchant Center help lists no schema.org property for question_and_answer, document_link, related_product, popularity_rank, variant_option or product_detail (only item_group_title maps, to ProductGroup.name), and Search Central does not document such markup: reading these attributes from schema.org is a stage statement, the feed is the documented route.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-04
Schema.org's release notes show version 30.1 (16 September 2026) added specification, isOftenBoughtWith and consumerNotice for Product, valueGroup for PropertyValue and itemPopularity for Offer as vocabulary for retail feed data; Google's Search Central docs did not yet document these properties on 3 October 2026.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Used byrequirement DEV-SHP-04
Shop developers should first keep core feed and markup values (price, availability, brand, GTIN) accurate, then add Q&As, product highlights, specs as key-value product details and related products in the Merchant Center feed, and mirror them in schema.org Product markup only as Google documents support for it.
Author Ibrahim AnjroAnnotates Day 3, 13:40 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Google added six Merchant Center feed attributes for AI shopping experiences: question and answer, documents, related products, item group title and variant option for variants, and popularity rank.
More shopping structured data news was left for a Day 3 talk by a Google colleague, Alex.
In product markup, an offer's shipping and return information can point through a JSON-LD identifier (@id) to shipping and return data defined elsewhere.
Google's shopping structured data launches of the previous year (2025) added support for merchant loyalty programs and shipping policies, letting merchants define a policy at organisation level and specify details at product level.
Google works to make sure that what merchants can express in its shopping feeds can also be expressed in schema.org, adding vocabulary where schema.org lacks it, for example for product details.
Google's structured data speaker said that in the months before the event Google added support for validity dates on sale prices in product structured data, so merchants no longer need to rush to remove a sale price when the sale ends for fear it shows wrongly in snippets.
Web markup is an efficient and unambiguous way for sites to share product data with Google, Google Shopping said, repeating the Day 2 structured data talk.
Parsing structured data is significantly cheaper and more efficient than relying on LLMs for every complex extraction task.
Rests on 9 claims, 9 of them in this topic
Mark up merchant listings completely, with validity dates for sale prices
Rests on 7 claims, 6 of them in this topic
Treat product Q&A and specification markup in schema.org as an extra on top of the feed
Rests on 6 claims, 5 of them in this topic
Declare return, shipping and loyalty policies once at organisation level
Rests on 4 claims, 3 of them in this topic
Describe only the page's main product in Product markup, not related-product carousels
Rests on 4 claims, 2 of them in this topic
Keep temporarily out-of-stock product pages live with 200 and their current availability
Rests on 5 claims, 1 of them in this topic
Answer planned maintenance and short outages with 503, for a day or two at most
Rests on 11 claims, 1 of them in this topic