Google Merchant Center Update: Attribute Rules Now Support Automatically Found Products

Enhancing Control Over Automated Product Discovery

Google has announced a significant expansion to the capabilities of Google Merchant Center, introducing the ability to apply attribute rules to products that are automatically discovered. This update marks a pivotal shift in how merchants can manage their product data, bridging the gap between manual feed uploads and Google’s autonomous crawling capabilities.

Previously, attribute rules—which allow merchants to transform, set, or modify product data without altering the source feed—were exclusively available for products added via traditional merchant feeds. However, Google’s ‘automatically found’ feature often identifies products directly from an online store’s website, bypassing the feed. Until now, these automatically added products lacked the flexibility of custom attribute rules, often leaving merchants with limited control over how these items were categorized or described in Google Shopping results.

What This Means for Online Merchants

With this update, merchants are now seeing prompts within the Merchant Center interface to apply specific rules to products discovered automatically. This means that if Google’s AI finds a product on your site but assigns an incorrect category or misses a critical attribute, you can now implement a rule to correct that data centrally within the Merchant Center.

Key benefits of this expansion include:

• Improved Data Accuracy: Correct discrepancies in product titles, descriptions, or categories for items not present in your primary feed.
• Consistent Branding: Ensure that automatically discovered products adhere to the same naming conventions and attribute standards as your manually curated feed.
• Reduced Manual Overhead: Avoid the need to manually add every single product to a feed if you trust Google’s discovery process but want a “safety net” of rules to ensure data quality.

Industry Reception and Implementation

The update was highlighted by industry experts, including Hana Kobzová via PPC News Feed, who noted that the rollout is currently appearing as prompts to users. Evidence from the community, including insights from Vojtěch Audy, suggests that the feature is being integrated into the workflow of stores using Google’s automated discovery tools.

For those managing large-scale e-commerce catalogs, this update provides a critical layer of quality assurance. It allows for a hybrid approach where Google handles the heavy lifting of product discovery, while the merchant retains the final say on the metadata that drives conversion and visibility.

How to Get Started

Merchants should monitor their Google Merchant Center dashboards for notifications regarding automatically found products. By navigating to the attribute rules section, users can now define conditions and actions that apply to these specific product sets, ensuring their entire catalog—regardless of how it entered the system—is optimized for maximum performance in Google Ads and organic shopping searches.