When does Google update its product taxonomy? What the version date tells you

How to tell which version you are looking at

Open taxonomy-with-ids.en-US.txt and read the first line. It is a comment with the version date:

# Google_Product_Taxonomy_Version: 2021-09-21

That is the whole versioning system: one date, in the file itself. There is no changelog and no announcement feed. When we downloaded the file on 19 September 2026, that line still read 2021-09-21, and the file listed 5,595 categories.

The list is fixed; the automatic assignment is not

Two different things get called the taxonomy, and they change on different clocks:

Google’s attribute page says every product is automatically assigned a category from its continuously evolving product taxonomy. So a product with no category of your own can land somewhere different over time, even while the file stays the same. A category you submit stays as you wrote it in your feed, and it is the value Google uses for the cases it lists, such as targeting in Google Ads.

Do old category values stop working?

Not according to Google. Its attribute page says: While you can submit any version of the categories published after August 2011, we’ll translate these to the latest version.

A new version is a reason to check your values, not a deadline to redo them. What can shift is where a translated value lands, which is worth a look for your best sellers.

If a new version does appear

The check takes an afternoon, not a project:

1. Download the new file and confirm the date on the first line has changed.
2. Compare the IDs your feed uses against the new file. Any ID that no longer appears needs a decision.
3. If you store category paths instead of IDs, compare the paths as well: a renamed category changes its path text. A feed that stores IDs avoids this step, which is one of the reasons the ID or path guide recommends IDs.
4. Spot-check your top sellers in Merchant Center a few days later.

How SellerSort keeps up

The Category Finder and Bulk Mapper work from a dated snapshot of Google’s file; the current one was downloaded on 19 September 2026 and carries the 2021-09-21 version. A newer file is compared against it before it is adopted, and a removed category is treated as a decision for a person, not something to apply silently. You can check the same thing yourself: the list guide shows where the files live.