What is a product feed? The file behind every Shopping listing

One row per product, one column per attribute

Open any feed and it looks like a spreadsheet. Each row is one thing a customer can buy, down to the variant: a black medium T-shirt and a black large T-shirt are two rows. Each column is an attribute with a fixed name that the receiving channel knows how to read.

That last value, 212, is the ID of Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Shirts & Tops in the Google product taxonomy. A real feed has more columns (link, image, brand, identifiers, shipping), but the shape never changes: rows are products, columns are facts about them.

Shoppers see your product page. Google’s systems see your feed.

What Google requires, and what it only recommends

Google’s product data specification marks each attribute with a requirement level. These are the ones every product needs, with the limits the specification gives:

Some requirements depend on what you sell and where. Apparel sold to people in Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, the UK or the US also needs color, size, gender and age_group, and variants in those countries need an item_group_id. Everything else in the specification is optional, which is not the same as useless.

The channel reads the feed, not your website

This is the part that surprises people. You can rewrite a product page beautifully and nothing changes in Shopping, because Merchant Center is still reading last week’s feed. The reverse bites harder: when the feed says a product costs $24 and the landing page says $29, Google flags a mismatched price, and its help page for that issue says the product may be disapproved until the two agree again.

So treat the feed as a second storefront that you maintain on purpose. Anything a shopper would be annoyed to discover after the click (a different price, an item that is actually sold out) is also something the channel checks.

Where a feed comes from

Most stores never hand-write one. Google lists several ways to get products in:

• A platform connection. Shopify’s Google & YouTube app or a WooCommerce feed plugin builds the feed from your catalog and keeps it in sync.
• A file. Tab-delimited text (.txt or .tsv) or XML, uploaded or fetched from a URL on a schedule. A single file can be up to 4 GB.
• A Google Sheets template, which suits a small catalog you edit by hand.
• The Merchant API, for developers pushing changes as they happen.

Whichever route you use, the result is the same list of rows. The feed format guide compares the file options if you are choosing one.

Where the product category fits in

Two columns describe what a product is. google_product_category takes a value from Google’s fixed taxonomy, ideally the numeric ID. product_type is your own label, written however your store organises things.

The Google category is optional. If you leave it out, Google says it uses internal signals to assign one. If you fill it in, the value has to be a real one: Google’s fix page for invalid categories says invalid values will be rejected and may prevent your products from appearing. That makes an empty cell safer than a guessed one.

Check your own feed in ten minutes

Export the feed (or the product CSV your feed is built from) and look for these:

1. Blank cells in any required column from the table above.
2. The same id on two rows. Each product needs its own.
3. Titles that bury the product type after the brand story. Shoppers usually see only the first 70 or so characters.
4. Category values that are not a plain taxonomy ID, such as a path with the ID glued to the front.

For the category column, paste a title into the free Category Finder to get the ID, or run the whole export through the Bulk Mapper and review only the rows it is unsure about.