Google announced a lot of new features and availability around shopping and product experiences in Google Search yesterday. Google expanded eligibility for merchant listing experiences, added more structured data properties, and released new Google Search Console reporting.
Expanding Eligibilty
Google has expanded eligibility for websites that implement structured data. Now merchants can be eligible for merchant listing experiences by providing product data on web pages without a Google Merchant Center account.
Here are the two categories:
- Merchant listing experiences for web pages that allow shoppers to buy a product on the site.
- Product snippets for a broader set of web pages with product information (including pages that sell products, publish product reviews, and/or aggregate information from other sites).
Ryan Levering from Google commented about how much work was done here between the different platforms and departments:
Very excited about this launch. It's been a while in coming and required lots of work between schema development, data ingestion, Search console reporting, etc. I like that it opens up more options for standardized data sharing of this information. https://t.co/3UH47euFFD
— Ryan Levering (@rrlevering) September 13, 2022
More properties
Note, you will see new product structured data support in the docs. Google said they made "Major update to Product structured data documentation to document requirements for eligibility to Merchant Listings experiences based on structured data."
They've also added "EnergyConsumptionDetails", "inProductGroupWithID" and "audience" as recommended properties as well.
— Brian Freiesleben (@type_SEO) September 13, 2022
New Search Console Reports
Google also released two new Google Search Console reports:
(1) New Merchant listings report that (1) identifies structured data issues for free listing experiences in search results, (2) that is relevant to pages that sell products, and (3) covers the wider range of schema.org structured data properties and types used by the Product type that is now supported for advanced cases, such as apparel sizing and energy efficiency ratings.
(2) Product snippets report that (1) identifies structured data issues for product snippets in search results, (2) that is relevant to pages that share product review information or aggregate product data from multiple sites. Note that pages selling products may also include product reviews and (3) replace the previous Product structured data report with adjustments related to the separation of merchant listing validations into a dedicated report. The history of prior validation errors is retained in this report.
Google also noted that "Product rich results are now called Product snippet. Some properties are no longer required for Product snippet rich results. As a result, you may see a drop in errors and warnings for your Product snippet items."
Here are those reports:
The new Shopping reports in the Search Console are here 👀 Product Snippets & Merchant Listings 👇 pic.twitter.com/EUkUFi9IHL
— Aleyda Solis 🇺🇦 (@aleyda) September 13, 2022
This is also built into the URL inspection tool and rich results tools:
@rustybrick did you check the new addition in rich snippet test and in search console? pic.twitter.com/IBpTuCqe9u
— Zunair Nasir (@zunair_digital) September 13, 2022
Here is how a merchant listing experience can appear in search results:
Here is how product snippet appear in search results:
We've been seeing a ton with Google and e-commerce and product listings in Google Search over the past few months, you should expect more over the coming months.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
