Last year, Google announced a new streamlined process that shows your products to customers, at no additional cost to the seller, in unpaid (non-ad) product results in places like Google Search and Google Images. Showing potential customers accurate and updated product information is essential to successful shopping journeys on Google. This new platform makes it even easier, and more cost-effective, to expand your reach and catch the attention of potential customers across varying platforms. 

Google launched a new way for customers in the United States to explore apparel and accessory options in a visually stimulating way through Google Search Information is pulled from product data taken from various crawls from across the web. The main goal with this is to more readily and accurately connect merchants with shoppers who are looking for the products they sell. 

Merchants that sell products in these categories and meet Google’s policy guidelines are able to show their products in a visually rich way on Google Search and other platforms across Google. Google is currently working on expanding this experience to reach other industries and product categories.

The new ways for sellers to provide information to improve results for shoppers include: 

• Search Console
  Many sellers and brands add structured data markup to their websites in order to confirm that Google fully understands the products that they offer. In addition, Google Search Console has released a new report for ‘Products’ that use schema.org structured data markup. This new report allows you to see a queue of issues for markup on your site and once an issue is resolved, you can use the report to confirm if your issues were fixed by re-crawling the affected pages. 
• Merchant Center
  Structured data markup helps Google accurately display seller’s product information once the site is crawled, but Google is broadening capabilities for all retailers to provide updated product information to Google in real-time. Product data feeds uploaded to Google Merchant Center will now qualify for display in results on surfaces like Google Search and Google Images and the product information will be ranked based solely on relevance to users’ searches for no additional cost. 
• Manufacturer Center
  Google Manufacturer Center allows for increased brand visibility and helps customers find products on Google by providing accurate and up-to-date product information. Information such as product descriptions, variants, and rich content, like high-quality images and videos, will now be included. 

These added solutions give sellers multiple options to better reach and inform potential customers about products as they shop across Google platforms. 

How to show your products on Surfaces Across Google 

Surfaces Across Google allows people to see product information from your store on varying Google surfaces like Images, Shopping, Lens, and Search. Google offers this program to eligible participating sellers for free. 

To be considered eligible, participating merchants must follow the policies to show products on Surfaces Across Google and meet at least one of the two following criteria:

• Merchants who have structured data markup on their website will automatically have their products shown on Surfaces Across Google.
• Merchants who submit a feed through Google Merchant Center can opt-in to Surfaces Across Google by selecting the corresponding program in Merchant Center.

Best practices for showing products on Surfaces Across Google

*Create a product feed

This feature enables merchants who submit a product feed to Google for the first time to enable their products to appear on Surfaces Across Google. 

The required characteristics to show your inventory on surfaces across Google are:

• Id
• Title
• Description
• Link
• Image_link
• Price
• Brand
• Gtin 

*Add the availability attribute 

It is highly recommended that the availability characteristic is added. Without it, your products may not appear in all search results on available surfaces across Google. 

*Add a canonical_link attribute 

Sellers can use this feature to tell Google that you would rather use the canonical link for the production of the web search index rather than the value submitted for the link attribute. 

*Set up Shopping configuration and shipping policy links

It may be helpful to add a link to your shopping policy to your program settings.