• The Human Customer: People are driven by emotion, visual appeal, and social proof. They require immersive interfaces, rich media, and frictionless UX.
• The Machine Customer: Driven by logic, speed, price-performance ratios, and structured data availability. They require robust APIs, "agent-ready" catalogs, and programmable logic.

The embedding of AI throughout the journey to purchase is a fact of life for consumers, too. AI has transformed how people approach complex decision making while shopping. Take Google Search, which has now become the place where people figure out what they want by a process of refining and exploration; not simply an engine for finding what they're looking for. In fact, 71% of shoppers agree they are open to trying new brands or products when searching².

By shifting from traditional keyword queries to conversational prompting for highly specific, multi-criteria needs, consumers can now leverage Google’s "AI Mode" and AI Overviews to surface tailored recommendations and interactive answers. Ultimately, this agentic AI can empower retailers to actually make shopping easier; maximising conversions by intelligently matching customer needs to product specifications.

To navigate the agentic transition, you need a strategy that locks in wins today while capturing the automated shopping behaviors of tomorrow. To help you drive growth right now, while also future-proofing your business, the Google Shopping (CSS) team mapped out the following framework.

While expanding your campaign presence is important, today we are focusing entirely on the foundational step of making your brand understood and attractive to shoppers, and that starts with your data. Feeds are the backbone of this entire framework, so we’re going to dive deep into how to master them in this playbook.

📷 Lever 1: High-Quality Product Images

We live in a highly visual world. Your images are a shopper's first point of contact and quality can heavily influence initial click rates. Make sure to accurately showcase the product you’re selling with multiple, diverse, high-resolution images. To get there, tools like Product Studio can instantly upgrade your visuals by enhancing image resolution and removing distracting backgrounds. The Google Shopping (CSS) team recommends that more than 55% of your items are with image quality (>= 1500x1500 px). 

📝 Lever 2: Detailed Titles & Descriptions

Optimised text fields match user queries accurately, preventing truncation in carousels and maximising ad impressions. Tools like FeedGen can help, think of it as your backend tool designed specifically to optimise feeds using Generative AI.

Key tip: Put your absolute best selling points at the beginning of the title. Incorporate hidden details (e.g., recycled materials) into your descriptions, and use search term reports to continuously align your copy with real customer language.

🏷️ Lever 3: Product Identifiers

Valid identifiers are the digital backbone of your catalog, allowing Google to accurately classify and target your products.

Key tip: Always map genuine GTINs directly from the product barcode. If you manufacture your own products, use your official store name as the brand attribute.

🚚 Lever 4: Shipping and Returns

Transparent, competitive operational policies clear purchase friction and aggressively drive conversion value.

Key tip: Define your account-level rules for basic settings (like free shipping over a certain order value), and use item-level labels if you run specific product exceptions. Ensure Googlebot can crawl your checkout and policy pages to verify fulfillment speeds.

✨ Lever 5: Enhanced Listings

Promotions, clear sales pricing, and review stars elevate your standard listings into high-converting real estate.

Key tip: Use the Merchant Center 'Marketing' tab to sync active business promotions, and activate the 'Analytics' tab to aggregate star ratings.

📈 Lever 6: Inventory Management

Total catalog coverage ensures you don't accidentally drop high-margin or best-selling SKUs from active bidding.

Key tip: Regularly check for catalog drop-outs caused by attribute changes. The Google Shopping (CSS) team highly recommends deploying a catch-all campaign alongside your structured groups to catch orphaned items, capture missed traffic, and simplify overarching inventory monitoring.

To optimise your feed effectively, we recommend aiming for a benchmark target where more than 95% of your products are actively targeted within your Shopping or Performance Max (PMax) campaigns.

👕 Lever 7: Variants Data

Granular variation metrics enable complex filtering, allowing shoppers to discover specific styles and configurations instantly. If your primary data lacks these isolated variant attributes, set up automated Merchant Center feed rules to parse and extract colors, genders, or sizes directly from your existing titles and descriptions.

By leveraging these seven levers and following our optimisation recommendations, you can fundamentally improve how Google understands, classifies, and targets your inventory, which ensures your products are matched to highly relevant customer queries.

Ultimately, executing on these data points builds transparency and trust directly within the search results, which could drive massive performance uplifts. To give you an example, offers with more than one image see a 76% average increase in impressions and a 32% increase in clicks³. The framework below highlights the top feed optimisation strategies essential for success in today's AI-driven commerce landscape.

While mastering these foundational data points should be your first priority, Google is already building the next generation of tools to help you take feed optimisation even further. Here’s a peek behind the curtain: