Google’s AI Is Shopping for Your Customers. Your Product Feed Decides If It Picks You.

If your Google Shopping campaigns aren’t delivering like they used to, the instinct is to look at your bidding strategy. Maybe your budget needs adjusting. Maybe your audience targeting is off. Maybe it’s time to restructure campaigns.

Those are all reasonable places to look, but it could be as simple as how you’ve set up your actual product feed.

Your Google Merchant Center tells Google what you sell, how much it costs, when it’s in stock, and what it looks like. Most eCommerce businesses set up their feed when they launched Shopping ads and haven’t meaningfully touched it since. Or, you hooked it up to Shopify and hoped for the best.

In 2026, that same product feed now controls your visibility across paid ads, free organic listings, AI-generated product recommendations, and AI-powered checkout where customers buy without visiting your website at all.

If your feed data is thin, outdated, or inconsistent with your actual website, you’re losing ground across every one of those surfaces. And most Australian eCommerce businesses don’t realise it.

Your Products Show Up in More Places Than You Think

Most eCommerce businesses think of their product feed as “the thing that makes Shopping ads work.”

In Australia right now, your Merchant Center product feed powers:

• Paid Shopping ads — the product listings that appear when someone searches for what you sell.
• Free product listings — organic product placements in the Shopping tab that cost you nothing. Barely anyone visits the Shopping tab, but still worth investing some time in.
• AI Overviews — the AI-generated summaries at the top of search results that increasingly include product recommendations.
• AI Mode results — Google’s conversational search experience, live in Australia since late 2025, which uses product data to answer complex shopping queries.

If you’re running Google Ads with an active Merchant Center feed, your products are already eligible for free organic placement in the Shopping tab, with zero additional ad spend. Eligibility and visibility aren’t the same thing. Products with thin titles, missing descriptions, and incomplete shipping data get buried IF you have competitors putting more work into theirs.

Six Feed Problems That Damage Your Shopping Performance

These are the issues we see most often when auditing eCommerce accounts, and they’re almost always the root cause when Shopping performance is declining despite reasonable campaign settings.

1. Generic product titles. If your titles are just the manufacturer’s product name — “Widget Pro 3000” — Google has almost nothing to work with when matching your products to search queries. Titles are the single biggest factor in Shopping ad relevance. Adding brand name, product type, key attributes (colour, size, material), and category detail can transform which searches your products appear for.
2. Thin or missing descriptions. Many feeds pull in empty description fields or generic manufacturer boilerplate. Google uses descriptions for relevance matching, particularly for longer, more specific search queries. A description that reads like someone actually describing the product to a customer performs vastly better than a spec sheet copy-paste.
3. Price and availability mismatches. When the price or stock status on your website doesn’t match what’s in your feed, Google disapproves the product. No notification pops up in your Google Ads dashboard, you just gradually lose impressions. This is especially common for businesses running sales or frequent inventory changes without real-time feed syncing.
4. No custom labels. Custom labels let you tag products by margin tier, seasonality, performance level, or promotion status. Without them, you’re bidding the same amount on a high-margin bestseller as you are on a clearance item that makes you $2. Smart organisation in your product feed settings makes for a much easier Google Ads campaign set-up.
5. Missing structured data on your website. Product schema, review schema, shipping and return policy data, these start on your eCommerce website and flow into the feed. If your product pages lack structured data, your feed is thinner than it needs to be, and Google has less information to work with when deciding where and how to display your products.

Google Is Building a Future Where AI Buys Products on Your Customers’ Behalf

In January 2026, Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in the United States. In practical terms, here’s what that looks like: a shopper asks Google’s AI to help find a rug for their dining room. The AI searches product feeds, compares options, recommends products, and  completes the purchase without the shopper ever visiting a retailer’s website. Etsy and Wayfair are among the first retailers offering this.

The entire transaction is powered by product feed data in Merchant Center. The AI reads titles, descriptions, pricing, images, shipping details, return policies, and (soon) answers to product FAQs to decide which products to recommend and which to skip.

Alongside UCP, Google announced dozens of new Merchant Center attributes specifically designed for AI-powered shopping, things like answers to common product questions, compatible accessories, and substitute products. These go well beyond the traditional title, price, and description fields. They’re currently rolling out to a small group of retailers, likely in the US first.

Google also launched “Business Agent” — a branded AI assistant that sits inside Search and answers product questions in a retailer’s voice, drawing from their Merchant Center data. Lowe’s, Reebok, and several other US retailers went live at launch.

Where does Australia sit?

UCP-powered checkout is not available in Australia. Business Agent is not available here either. The new conversational Merchant Center attributes haven’t been confirmed for Australian merchants yet. Google hasn’t announced a timeline for any of these features in this market.

Australia is never the testing ground for new features, but we always follow and anything Google can do to make purchasing easier or faster you can bet they’ll action sooner or later.

We’re watching this closely. The checkout piece isn’t here yet, and it could be 6–12 months away. But the underlying shift is already happening: Google’s AI systems are using your product feed to decide which products to recommend, and AI Overviews and AI Mode are both live in Australia right now. Every feed improvement you make today pays off immediately through better Shopping ad performance and free listing visibility. And it positions you for agentic commerce when it arrives.

If you’re thinking about how to make your SEO strategy and product visibility AI-ready, the product feed is the single most important place to start for eCommerce.

The 30-Minute Feed Audit That Could Save You Thousands in Wasted Ad Spend

If you haven’t reviewed your product feed in the last six months, here’s where to start, in priority order.

1. Check Merchant Center diagnostics for disapprovals. Log into Google Merchant Center, go to Diagnostics, and look at product issues. Disapproved products don’t show in ads or free listings at all. Most businesses have disapprovals they don’t know about — price mismatches, missing identifiers, policy violations. Fixing these is the fastest win because you’re recovering visibility you’ve already paid for.
2. Enrich your product titles. Add brand name, product type, key attributes (colour, size, material), and category context. A title like “Nike Air Max 90 Men’s Running Shoe — White/Black” performs dramatically better than “Air Max 90.” Google matches products to search queries based heavily on titles, so this directly affects which searches trigger your products.
3. Write real descriptions. Replace manufacturer boilerplate with descriptions that match how a customer would actually describe the product. Include use cases, materials, sizing context.
4. Add complete shipping and return policy data. Shipping cost is the number one reason for cart abandonment, and Google uses this data to rank products in Shopping results. Complete shipping and returns data also improves free listing eligibility. Google is requiring this data for UCP checkout eligibility in the US, getting it right now means you’re ready when that feature reaches Australia.
5. Set up custom labels. Tag products by margin tier (high, medium, low), seasonality, performance level, and promotion status. This lets you create campaign segments like “high-margin bestsellers” and bid on them differently from low-margin clearance. Feed rules in Merchant Center can automate this based on price ranges or other product attributes.
6. Implement product schema on your website. Product schema, review schema, and FAQ schema on your product pages enrich the data Google can pull into your feed.
7. Start adding product FAQ content. Answer the questions your customers actually ask, on your product pages and in FAQ schema markup. Google’s new conversational Merchant Center attributes are built around exactly this kind of data. Australian merchants can’t access those attributes yet, but building the content now means you’re ready when the rollout expands and in the meantime, FAQ schema improves your organic product page visibility anyway.

If you’re spending over $3k a month on Shopping and haven’t done steps 1 through 3, that’s where your next performance improvement is.

Where Your Feed, Website, and Campaigns Meet

The common thread through all of this is that product feed quality isn’t a Google Ads task. It’s the junction where your website, your SEO, and your paid campaigns all converge.

Your product pages generate the data. Your feed structures and delivers it to Google. Your Shopping campaigns, free listings, AI Overviews, and AI Mode results all draw from it. When the feed is strong, everything downstream performs better. When it’s weak, no amount of campaign optimisation can compensate.

Most eCommerce businesses have their feed managed by whoever set up their Shopping ads. That made sense when the feed only powered ads. It doesn’t make sense when the same data controls organic visibility, AI discoverability, and whether an AI agent recommends your product to a customer who’s ready to buy.

If your Shopping performance has been slipping and you haven’t audited your product feed recently, that’s where we’d start.

Get in touch and we’ll take a look.

Zac Fitzpatrick

PPC Service Lead