The Feed Attributes Nobody Fills In (And Why They Now Matter)

Google Merchant Centre has over 200 product attributes. Most merchants fill in about 15.

Title, description, price, image, availability, brand, GTIN, colour, size. The basics. The ones that stop your products from being disapproved. The ones your feed tool populates automatically.

The rest get ignored. And that's about to become expensive.

With Google's AI Business Agent now live and conversational shopping expanding, those "optional" attributes are becoming the data source for product recommendations. If you haven't filled them in, the AI has nothing to work with when a shopper asks a specific question.

The attributes that matter most

product_highlight

This is a list of up to 10 short bullet points describing a product's most important features. Think of it as the bullet list on your product page, but structured for Google. Most merchants leave it completely empty.

In a conversational context, product highlights give the AI specific selling points to reference. "Made from recycled ocean plastic", "Machine washable at 40°C", "Fits true to size" - these are the phrases the agent will use when recommending your product over a competitor's.

product_detail

This attribute allows you to provide additional technical specifications as structured name-value pairs. Material composition, thread count, wattage, capacity - the kind of detail that shoppers ask about but titles can't contain.

When someone asks "Is this jacket breathable?" the agent can only answer if breathability is in your product details. If it isn't, your product doesn't get recommended. Simple as that.

Product ratings and reviews

Google's product ratings programme has been available for years. Most brands either haven't configured it or set it up once and forgot about it. The AI Business Agent can surface "best-rated" products. If your ratings aren't flowing into Merchant Centre, your products are excluded from every "what's the best..." query.

Energy efficiency and certification labels

For applicable categories - appliances, electronics, lighting - energy labels are increasingly required. But beyond compliance, they're a signal of product quality that the AI can reference. "Energy rating A++" is exactly the kind of fact a conversational agent uses to build confidence in a recommendation.

lifestyle_image_link and additional_image_link

Most merchants submit one product image. Google allows up to 10 additional images and a lifestyle image. In conversational and visual shopping experiences, image variety matters. The agent can reference "see it styled" or "view the product in use" - but only if you've provided those assets.

custom_label_0 through custom_label_4

Custom labels don't feed the AI directly, but they control what gets surfaced and how. Margin tier, stock velocity, seasonal relevance, promotional status - these labels let you control the narrative. When the agent looks for "best deals" or "new arrivals", your custom label structure determines which products qualify.

Why these were ignorable before

In a keyword-matching world, the only attributes that mattered for performance were the ones Google used for targeting and filtering. Title, category, brand, price, availability. Everything else was cosmetic.

Feed tools reflected this. They made the required fields easy and the optional fields invisible. Agencies didn't push for them because they didn't move the metrics they reported on.

That calculus has changed. Every empty attribute is now a question your products can't answer.

The competitive gap

Here's the uncomfortable reality: most of your competitors haven't filled these in either. The brands that do it now - before the UK rollout of the AI Business Agent - will have a structural advantage when conversational shopping goes live.

This is not a one-off task. It's an infrastructure investment. Populating product highlights, product details, ratings, and imagery across a full catalogue takes time. The brands that start now will be ready. The brands that wait for the feature to arrive in the UK will be scrambling.

Feed completeness has always mattered for Google Shopping performance. But it's about to matter for an entirely new reason: your feed is becoming the knowledge base for a sales agent. The more it knows, the more it sells.

Fill in the fields nobody fills in. That's where the advantage lives.