Who uses the Google product taxonomy? Google, Meta, Microsoft and your feed tools

Google: the owner

Google’s attribute page says all products are automatically assigned a category from its taxonomy. The value you send in google_product_category can override that only in specific cases, and two of those are practical ones:

• Category-specific requirements. Apparel, for example, needs color, size, gender and age group for several countries.
• Ads targeting. Shopping campaign product groups can be subdivided by category, and so can Performance Max listing groups, though only when the campaign targets one of twelve countries Google lists. The Google Ads guide covers both.

Meta: the same file, reused

Meta’s catalog documentation describes google_product_category as the item classified according to Google’s product taxonomy, and links straight to Google’s taxonomy-with-ids file. It is optional there too. Meta uses it for things like building product sets and, in the US, deciding size and return-window requirements. The Meta catalogs page has the details.

Microsoft: compatible, not identical

Microsoft Advertising lists google_product_category as an attribute it uses, and describes its own product_category field as equivalent to it. But its documentation says native values must come from Microsoft’s own predefined taxonomy, which it publishes separately.

So the accurate summary is that Microsoft accepts the Google-formatted attribute, not that it runs on Google’s taxonomy. See Microsoft Advertising.

Store platforms and feed tools: the translators

Shopify keeps a taxonomy of its own and publishes an official mapping from it to Google’s. The mapping runs one way (Shopify to Google), targets the 2021-09-21 Google file, and lists Shopify categories that have no Google equivalent. The Shopify guide explains where it stops.

WooCommerce has no category field for Google in core; feed plugins add one, as the WooCommerce page describes. Feed management tools do the same job for many channels at once, with Google’s list as the usual target.

Why one good decision travels

Because several channels read the same list, the category for a product is worth deciding once, carefully, and storing as an ID you reuse. Deciding it separately in each tool is how the same kettle ends up as a kettle on Google, a small appliance on Meta, and uncategorised in your own reports.

Keep one column of Google category IDs next to your product IDs, and feed every channel from it. The Bulk Mapper fills that column for a whole catalog export and flags the rows it is unsure about.