Feed specification

Google Shopping feed specification: what is required, what is conditional, and what breaks.

Most feed rejections come from a handful of attributes rather than from the long tail of the specification. This page lists the attributes a product feed actually needs and the conditions that turn an optional field into a required one.

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Base set

A small group of attributes is required for every product.

Conditional

Identifiers, apparel fields and shipping depend on context.

Consistency

Feed values must match the landing page, or the item is disapproved.

Required for everything

The base attributes every item needs.

These are the attributes without which an item cannot be processed at all. They are stable across markets, and a PIM should treat a product missing any of them as unpublishable rather than letting the feed generate and fail.

The two that cause the most trouble are price and availability, because they are the most likely to be stale. A feed that reports a price the landing page does not show is disapproved, so both values need to come from the same governed source rather than from two systems that update on different schedules.

Attribute	What it holds	Common failure
id	A unique, stable identifier for the item	Reused after a product is retired
title	The product name as a shopper would search it	Stuffed with keywords or all upper case
description	The product description	Copied marketing slogan with no specifications
link	The product landing page URL	Redirect chain or a category page
image_link	The main product image URL	Placeholder, watermark or promotional overlay
availability	In stock, out of stock or preorder	Disagrees with the landing page
price	Price with currency	Excludes required tax or disagrees with the page

Conditionally required

The attributes that become mandatory in context.

Identifier attributes are the main conditional group. Google expects a GTIN where one exists, brand and MPN as the pair to use where it does not, and an explicit declaration when a product has no manufacturer identifier at all. Getting this triple consistent is what removes the largest single category of identifier warnings.

Apparel is the other significant group. Items in clothing and accessories categories need variant attributes so that sizes and colours of the same garment are grouped rather than competing with each other. Shipping and tax requirements vary by target country, so confirm the current rules for each market you feed.

Attribute	Required when	Note
gtin	The product has a manufacturer-assigned GTIN	Send the normalized value, never a SKU
brand	The product has a brand	Use the manufacturer brand, not the retailer
mpn	There is no GTIN	Send with brand as a pair, verbatim
identifier_exists	The product genuinely has no GTIN or MPN	Must agree with the empty fields
condition	The item is not new	New, refurbished or used
item_group_id	The item is one variant of several	Shared across the variant group
color, size, age_group, gender	Apparel and accessories categories	Required together for variants
shipping	The target country needs declared shipping	Confirm per market

The consistency rule

Most disapprovals are a mismatch, not a missing field.

Google compares the feed against the landing page. If the feed says a price the page does not show, or says in stock while the page says sold out, the item is disapproved even though every required attribute is present. That makes the feed a downstream artefact of the catalog, not an independent document that marketing maintains separately.

The structural fix is to generate the feed from the same approved product record that generates the storefront, so a value cannot differ between them. Where price and stock live in a commerce platform rather than the PIM, the feed should read them from that platform at generation time instead of from a cached copy.

One approved source for price, availability and title
Feed generated from the record the storefront renders
Landing page reachable without a redirect chain or a login
Currency and target country consistent across the feed

Operating it

Treat the specification as validation rules, not as documentation.

The specification is only useful when it is enforced before submission. Encode it as completeness and validation rules against your catalog so a product that would be rejected is visible as an exception in the PIM rather than as a disapproval in Merchant Center days later.

Nexodo builds feeds from versioned, approved mappings, so the field list a channel receives is reviewable and repeatable, and a mapping change is a decision with a history rather than an edit to an export script. Confirm the current attribute list in the Google Merchant Center product data specification before each major mapping change, because the specification does move.

Validate the required set before generating, not after submitting
Version the mapping so a change is reviewable
Re-check the specification before each major mapping revision
Keep one mapping per channel rather than one export per campaign

Frequently asked questions

Clear answers before you evaluate a PIM.

Which attributes are required for every product?

id, title, description, link, image_link, availability and price form the base set. Identifier attributes, variant attributes, condition, shipping and tax become required depending on the product and the target market.

What do I send if a product has no GTIN?

Send brand and mpn together, exactly as the manufacturer publishes them. If the product genuinely has neither, set the identifier existence attribute to indicate that and leave the identifier fields empty. Do not put a SKU in the GTIN field.

Why is my item disapproved when every field is filled in?

Most often the feed and the landing page disagree on price or availability, or the image is a placeholder or carries promotional text. Check the page as a shopper sees it before checking the feed again.

How often should the feed be regenerated?

Often enough that price and availability are never stale, which for most catalogs means at least daily and more frequently for fast-moving stock. Static attributes such as descriptions and specifications can follow the catalog approval cycle.

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Google Shopping feed specification: what is required, what is conditional, and what breaks.

The base attributes every item needs.

The attributes that become mandatory in context.

Most disapprovals are a mismatch, not a missing field.

Treat the specification as validation rules, not as documentation.

Clear answers before you evaluate a PIM.

Continue your product data research

Google product category: how the taxonomy works and how to map a catalog to it.

Build channel output from approved product data, not another spreadsheet.

Marketplace product data requirements, side by side.

The Shopify product CSV, column by column, including the rows that confuse everyone.

Test Nexodo with a supplier file your team already uses.