Having your inventory added automatically to Merchant Center is a faster and easier way to start or test your local inventory ads without building your own inventory data. It helps you onboard to local inventory ads efficiently by automatically generating inventory data for you.
On this page:
- How it works
- Requirements
- Implementation
- Pause local inventory 'Found by Google'
- Frequently asked questions
How it works
Google uses Google StoreBot to crawl your website to deduce local inventory availability information and create inventory data directly within Merchant Center. Google will then create inventory data for the highest-performing products and shops, representing the highest percentage of clicks.
Requirements
Before participating in auto-feed crawl, you must take note of the following:
- Your website must show the in-store availability of your product across your shops.
-
You must not block Google crawlers such as Google StoreBot and Googlebot from crawling your website.
- Google will crawl the top product or shop pairs per day. You can prevent specific products from showing in local inventory ads by using the excluded destination
[excluded_destination]attribute in your primary data source and the value 'Local_inventory_ads'. - If you wish to upgrade to cover more inventory, you must either:
- Create and upload your own inventory data or
- Implement the Pixel-based data. Contact your Google representative for more information on the Pixel-based data
Implementation
After you activate the local inventory ads or free local listings add-on and you've added your shops, Google will try to extract your inventory and, if successful, it'll be shown in the 'Add inventory' section of your local setup.
Pause local inventory 'Found by Google'
If you wish to pause the local inventory extraction, follow the instructions below:
In your Merchant Center account, click the Settings and tools icon
, then select 'Add-ons'.
Select 'Your add-ons'.
In the 'Local inventory ads' card or 'Free local listings' card, click Go to local inventory ads or Go to free local listings.
Click Show me next to the country for which you want to pause the local inventory extraction.
Select 'Add inventory'.
Select 'Pause automatic inventory'.
Confirm that you want to pause inventory extraction.
By pausing the automatic inventory, data will no longer be updated and will be removed after 14 days. If inventory is not provided for a product, your local product will not be shown on Google.
You can resume the automated inventory at any time by clicking Add inventory under 'Add inventory'.
Frequently asked questions
Why can't I find automatically extracted local inventory in my account?
There are multiple reasons why Google is unable to extract local inventory data from your website.
- Your website needs to be eligible for product pages with in-store availability.
- Your website must allow the Google StoreBot crawler to crawl your product pages. The crawler must be allowed to view in-store availability for your products to be able to extract inventory.
- You must have shops added to your Merchant Center account, which are located in the country in which you are currently onboarding onto local inventory ads or free local listings.
- The shops added to your Merchant Center account must match the shops shown in your online shop.
- Your products need to be enabled for the local inventory ads and free local listings marketing methods.
If you meet all these requirements but Google isn't able to provide inventory data on your behalf, contact our support team.
How can I troubleshoot the Google StoreBot crawler not being able to extract my local inventory?
There are several ways that the Google StoreBot crawler can be blocked from accessing your website. Learn about how to fix the issue.
I see 'Adding inventory found by Google' in my account for over 48 hours. What should I do?
If you meet all these requirements but inventory hasn't been added, please contact our support team.