Product feed
A product feed is a file listing your products and their details, such as title, price and availability, that you send to Google, ChatGPT or another channel.
- Data feed
- Shopping feed
What it means
A product feed hands your catalogue to a platform that shows products: one record per product, each value in the field and format that platform asks for. Google Merchant Center now calls it a data source, “previously known as ‘Feeds’”, and takes it as a file, a Google Sheets template or a connection to your ecommerce platform.1
Google’s product data specification marks each attribute Required, It depends or Optional, and a product missing a Required one “won’t be able to be served in ads and free listings”.2
OpenAI takes a product feed for ChatGPT, saying feeds help ChatGPT “surface the right products with accurate pricing, availability, and seller context”.3 Its specification requires nine fields for every item: an ID, a title, a description, a product page URL, the brand, the seller’s name, a main image, availability and price.4
Think of it like this
Building a feed is like filling in the customs form for a parcel going abroad. The goods are yours, but the boxes are the carrier’s, and a box left blank or filled in the wrong way holds the parcel up.
For example
A kettle you are taking orders for, but which has not been released yet, goes into a Google feed with the availability preorder.5 OpenAI’s feed for ChatGPT spells the same value pre_order, and calls the ID field item_id rather than id.4 Same kettle, same facts, two formats.
Why it matters
A feed is checked as well as shown. Google compares the price in your data with your landing page, and where they differ, “the product with the mismatch may be disapproved”.6 Build every feed from one clean catalogue, so each platform receives the same facts.
Not to be confused with
A product feed and structured data are separate things. The feed is a file you send; structured data is code on your own product pages, and Google says providing both helps it “correctly understand and verify your data”.7
Sources
- Google Merchant Center Help. Data source (previously known as ‘Feeds’).
- Google Merchant Center Help. Product data specification.
- OpenAI Developers, Agentic Commerce. Product feeds.
- OpenAI Developers. Agentic Commerce product feed specification: Products.
- Google Merchant Center Help. Availability [availability].
- Google Merchant Center Help. How to fix: Mismatched product price.
- Google Search Central. Introduction to Product structured data.