product feed

Google Merchant Center treats the feed as the source of truth for every item you want in Shopping ads and free listings. Its product data specification marks a core set of attributes as required for all products: id, title, description, link, image_link, availability, and price, with brand required for most items and gtin or mpn required to identify them. Miss or mis-format one and the item gets disapproved and stops serving.

What goes in the file

Feeds are usually CSV, XML, TSV, or JSON. Each row is one product (or one variant), and the same file can be pushed to Google, Amazon, Meta, Pinterest, and comparison engines, so you maintain product data once instead of rekeying it per channel.

Feed quality is not just compliance. Practitioners front-load the most useful terms in the title (brand first, then color, size, material) because that is what shoppers scan and match against. Category mapping keeps items out of the wrong bucket so ad spend stays relevant, and complete, accurate attributes are what platforms reward with visibility. A feed that technically validates but ships thin titles and missing GTINs will still lose to a well-structured one. Because the feed constantly changes with price and stock, it is pulled by URL and re-synced automatically rather than re-uploaded by hand.