Google Feed Ops

Google Feed Ops

Reviewed 2026-09-02. Baseline: Sonnet 5 / Claude Code subagent / 2026-09-02; 2026-09-03 blind suspension task [R] — site-review and second-account rules already known. The retail data layer. Google Ads buys the traffic; the feed decides what is eligible, what it costs, and what gets suspended — and the Merchant Center account is reviewed on the site, not the feed. No Facebook analogue at this depth.

Route: buy mechanics → google-ads · infra/survival/agency accounts and MC↔Ads cascade → google-grey-ops (12) · counting → tracker-ops · portfolio decisions → senior-buyer-ops.

Check first

gmcops lives in google-grey-ops/scripts/ (one uv project with googleops); usage in google-grey-ops/10. Read-only doctor first: gmcops --account <id> --json doctor --country US.

Three things that break accounts

1. The five review gates. Shipping settings · a data source for the target country · website URL claimed and verified · business address verified · US tax settings. Missing any one blocks review entirely. This is the real cause of most "products not showing" tickets — check before diagnosing anything else.
2. Feed vs live page mismatch on price and availability. Google's automated crawl fires preemptive item disapproval. It is automated, so the fix is a sync fix, never an appeal-and-argue. Compare against the checkout total, not just the product page.
3. Promotional text in titles or descriptions. A policy trigger, not a soft ranking issue.

Migration status 🔺

• Content API for Shopping sunset 2026-08-18. Only API integrations broke — manual upload, scheduled fetch, Sheets, and platform connectors were unaffected.
• Merchant API v1beta discontinued 2026-02-28, earlier than the Content API sunset.
• Current: merchantapi.googleapis.com, stable v1.
• UCP (in-Google checkout via native_commerce(checkout_eligibility)) is early access, select merchants, US/CA/AU only. It did not replace Buy on Google, which shut down 2023-09-26.

Model

Merchant Center account -> verification gates -> data source(s)
  primary feed (structured) -> feed rules / supplemental feeds (overlay)
    product -> id / title / price / availability / GTIN / custom_label_0-4
      listing group filter -> asset group (PMax) or product group (Shopping)
        -> bid strategy per segment

The throughline: label schema → listing-group filter → divergent bid strategy per filter — how per-segment economics happen without per-SKU bidding.

Workflow

1. Clear the five review gates before anything else.
2. Establish one primary submission method per data source — mixing causes silent last-write-wins conflicts.
3. Fix required attributes and GTIN coverage — a missing real GTIN costs visibility and disables price benchmarking.
4. Build the custom_label schema before campaign structure, since structure depends on it: margin tier, price band, bestseller rank, seasonality, stock lifecycle (canonical table in 01, don't reinvent).
5. Optimize titles for the ~70-character cliff, specs before adjectives, decision-driving attributes first.
6. Confirm destinations and listing-group keys are valid. PMax/Shopping campaign structure, feed-only vs assets, brand exclusions, and product-level reporting live in google-ads (01, 07).

Guardrails

• id is the join key. Never reuse or recycle it.
• Never fake a gtin or mpn with an internal SKU — set identifier_exists=no.
• Never submit a sale_price without the real non-sale price. That is a misrepresentation trigger.
• shipping_label and custom_label_0-4 are unrelated. Conflating them is a common integration bug.
• Use the test/preview mode on attribute rules. It prevents catalog-wide breakage.
• Campaign priority does nothing unless two campaigns share the same products in the same country and language — and an under-budgeted high-priority campaign silently falls back to the low-priority one.
• AI title generation belongs in a testing sandbox, not in production. Codify winning patterns into templates with fallback chains.
• CSS is EEA/Switzerland/UK only. The ~20% figure has zero US applicability — never cite it to a US advertiser.
• Merchant Center and Google Ads suspensions are separate systems with separate appeals, but a linked pair is one blast radius: a suspended Ads account linked to the MC suspends the MC, and unlinking afterwards does not clear it (official). Fix the Ads side first, then request MC review.
• Never open a second MC account to escape a suspension — same domain/store/identity gets suspended again and reframed as Circumventing systems.
• Fix everything before requesting review. 1–3 attempts before the button locks; each denial adds a growing cool-down. issueresolution.triggeraction (programmatic appeal) is allowlist-gated.
• Products are only writable via API into API-type data sources; processed products appear after several minutes; the key is contentLanguage~feedLabel~offerId.
• US tax settings, phone/address verification, and identity documents have no API surface — UI.

Output

Lead with which layer the problem sits in — gates, feed data, policy, or campaign structure. Most "campaign" problems in retail are feed problems. Give the exact attribute or setting, the expected review timeline (3–5 business days initial, up to 7 for account suspension, 24–48h for a re-crawl), and what to verify after the next refresh.