Google introduces automatic item updates

Rolling out at the end of this month, Google will launch a feature that will update product pricing and stock availability in order to help online retailers compete with ecommerce leaders.

Known simply as automatic item updates, the feature is part of a much larger strategy to help merchants optimize conversions, without the need of the Schema.org markup.

Using the proprietary machine learning tools and statistical models of Google, the feature will be able to detect and extract data about products from a merchant's online store. Marketers that want to opt-in need only wait for the rollout to enrol them by default, after which product page SEO will need to be looked into to coincide with the datasets the new system can read.

Merchants that do not wish to opt-in can do so, only after the update has been rolled out.

According to a post on the Google Merchant Center Help page, the feature doesn't require any triggers on the merchant online store in order to read the necessary data, removing the need for triggers and codes predominantly deployed for white-hat SEO.

The update comes at a time when personalised search marketing results in better prices than what a prospect may find on the original merchants' online store. When this discrepancy occurs between the product price and description on a merchant page and on Google Shopping, the latter advertising format is not served at all.