Google Shopping: how do you get your products to appear?

What is Google Shopping?

Google Shopping is Google’s product search service. It collects information from the sellers who chose to be listed and sends the shopper to their website. Its official help page says so: “Google Shopping does not sell products directly to shoppers”.

Listings are ranked by relevance, search terms and user activity. Google receives nothing for clicks, except on results labeled “Sponsored” or “Ad”. For these offers, the advertiser’s payment can also affect the ranking.

Some of the recommendations on the Shopping home page are generated by AI. Checkout on Google (“Buy on Google”) ended in September 2023. Ratings combine Google Customer Reviews and third-party sources: they may differ from those on the merchant’s website.

These listings come from the Shopping Graph, Google’s product database, which holds “more than 60 billion” listings according to Google (October 15, 2026). This is Google’s own claim, with no published method, and it counts listings, not distinct products.

For a merchant, Shopping is both a free showcase and an advertising channel, like the campaigns presented in our SEA guide.

Free listings or Shopping ads: what is the difference?

Free listings and Shopping ads rely on the same product data, sent to Google Merchant Center. The former cost nothing but come with no guarantee of being shown. The latter are paid per click and managed in Google Ads. Free listings have existed since 2020: on April 21, 2020, Google announced a Shopping tab made up mainly of free listings, first in the United States, then worldwide.

A Shopping ad can appear at the same time as a text ad, if both are relevant. Google can also enhance it with elements from the landing page, images and content created by its AI. According to Google Ads Help, you can opt out of this on request, within 3 to 5 business days.

Google Merchant Center: how do you set it up?

Google Merchant Center is the tool where you upload and manage your product data for Search, Maps, YouTube and Google’s other surfaces. It is free, and required to appear in the Shopping tab.

1. Create the account: one Google Account email address matches one Merchant Center account. Choose the country carefully: it cannot be changed after the initial setup.
2. Enter your business and shipping details: in France, shipping settings (or the shipping attribute in the feed) are required.
3. Add your products: Google can automatically import your store’s information when you sign up. Otherwise, upload a file or sync a platform such as Shopify.
4. Choose your marketing methods: this is the new name for “destinations”. Free listings are turned on by default in most cases; ads also require a Google Ads campaign.
5. Monitor diagnostics: fix disapproved products before you launch ads.

To check the status of your free listings, open Marketing, then Marketing methods, then the “Free listings” card.

The required attributes of the product feed

The feed, also called the product data source, describes each item through attributes. Seven are required for all products; others depend on the type of item.

The feed also accepts a question_and_answer attribute: questions and answers about the product, written by users, merchants or manufacturers. The limit is 30 values and 10,000 characters in total. Do not repeat them in product_detail or product_highlight.

Why products get disapproved

A product is disapproved when it breaks a Google policy or when its data does not match its page. The Shopping policies cover four areas: prohibited content, prohibited practices, restricted content and site requirements. Google enforces them through AI and human review.

Catalogs with volatile prices are exposed. Merchant Center’s automatic updates can fail when the price or availability changes more than once a day. The product may then be disapproved instead of updated. If mismatches keep piling up, Google can suspend these updates.

How do you appear for free on Google Shopping?

To appear for free on Google Shopping, you need a Merchant Center account with approved products. Only product pages can appear, not the home page, category pages or shipping pages.

Google can also show products crawled on your store, even without Merchant Center or schema.org markup; you then control this through your crawling and indexing rules. But the Shopping tab requires Merchant Center, as Google Search Central points out. Structured data is optional there: it helps Google understand the page and validate the feed.

A store uses Product “merchant listing” markup, reserved for pages where you can buy (the “product snippet” covers pages without a purchase option). Google updated its documentation on September 8, 2026; our guide to Product structured data explains how to set it up. If you have a physical store, your listings can also appear in the products module of your Business Profile, in Maps.

Shopping campaign or Performance Max: which one should you choose?

Both Google Ads campaign types rely on the Merchant Center feed. The standard Shopping campaign still exists and leaves you in control of bids; Performance Max serves ads more widely, with automated bidding.

For now, the Shopping campaign has no creative component (text, image, video): the ad comes from the feed. Smart Shopping no longer exists: Google converted these campaigns to Performance Max from July to September 2022. When you create a Shopping campaign, Google offers a Performance Max campaign instead; you can decline.

The rule for running both side by side has changed. In 2022, the migration page gave Performance Max priority over standard Shopping campaigns targeting the same products. The current page on how Performance Max interacts with other campaigns keeps the best Ad Rank when several campaigns are eligible for the same impression. The only documented exception: an exact match Search keyword. It does not name standard Shopping, and the old page has not been updated.

How a Performance Max campaign and automated bidding work is covered in our guides. Shopping ads do not rely on keywords, unlike Search campaigns and their keyword selection.

Google Ads Help also says that local inventory ads will “soon” be served by default in Shopping campaigns, with no precise effective date.

Why do Shopping ads say “By Google”?

The “By Google” label names the CSS (Comparison Shopping Service) that serves the ad. In 21 countries, including France, Shopping ads and free listings must be served by a CSS, according to Merchant Center Help on CSSs. The list also includes Germany, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

For a merchant in France, these rules have four practical consequences.

• You can use Google Shopping or any other CSS, and several CSSs at the same time.
• Each CSS, Google Shopping included, pays Google for clicks on its ads and sets its own billing for the merchant.
• The ad shows a “By” link at the bottom, followed by the name of the CSS.
• The same offer imported by several CSSs appears only once in the ad block.

Elev8 Lab has no commercial relationship with the CSSs or the vendors mentioned.

The Google Shopping case before the EU courts

In a decision of June 27, 2017, the European Commission found that Google had abused its dominant position by favoring its own comparison shopping service in its general search results. Thirteen countries of the European Economic Area (EEA) were affected, including France.

The General Court of the European Union upheld the fine on November 10, 2021, and the CJEU dismissed the appeal brought by Google and Alphabet on September 10, 2024 (Case C-48/22 P). No official page consulted links this ruling to the current CSS program: the timeline is given without any causal link.

Universal Cart and agentic shopping: what can you prepare from France?

As of October 19, 2026, Google’s new AI shopping features cover the United States and a few other countries, none of them in the European Union. None is announced for France in the Google posts consulted.

Unveiled on May 19, 2026, Universal Cart was then meant to come to YouTube and Gmail; the launch post no longer mentions this.

From France, you can already prepare your feed: complete data, identical prices in the feed and on the page, and a question_and_answer attribute filled in with real customer questions.

How do you measure Google Shopping results?

Google Shopping results are measured at three levels.

• Free listings: the “Performance” page in Merchant Center, filtered to show free listings only.
• Ads: Shopping or Performance Max campaign reports in Google Ads.
• Visits and sales on the website: your analytics tool, for example Google Analytics 4.

To get started, the order matters. Open a Merchant Center account in the right country, set up shipping, send a complete feed that matches your pages, then check your free listings in the marketing methods. The Shopping or Performance Max campaign comes next, once disapprovals are fixed. On Google Shopping, free or paid, everything starts from this feed.