Free listings

Google's no-cost product listings on Search, Maps, YouTube, the Shopping tab, Images and more, built from the product data you give Merchant Center.

With a free listing, the products you sell can appear at no cost on Google Search, Google Maps, Gemini, YouTube, the Shopping tab, Google Images and Google Lens (Google Merchant Center Help). Free listings help your product pages appear in search results, not pages such as your homepage or category pages. They cover products sold online and in stores, alongside any paid ads you run.

In most cases free listings are turned on by default, and a new Merchant Center account is opted in. The setting gives Google permission to show your products but doesn’t guarantee they’ll be shown, since Google relies on the data you provide to match your products with what customers might be searching for.

What Google asks of you

• Follow its policies for showing products for free across Google.
• Add your return policy to your website. Google also recommends adding it in Merchant Center.
• Set up shipping settings or add shipping costs to your product data. It’s required in the countries Google lists, among them the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.
• Give every product an ID, title, link, image link, price, description and availability. Others, such as brand, GTIN or MPN, are required for some products, and color and size for apparel and accessories.
• Link your Merchant Center account to your Business Profile, if you have one.

Your platform and your data

If you use a third-party platform to show or sell your products across Google, Google says to link your Merchant Center account with it. If a partner created your account, your product data came in through the Merchant API, and changes go through the partner. Either way, the “Needs attention” tab on Merchant Center’s Products page shows problems with your product details, and the Performance page can be filtered to free listings.

Even with free listings turned off, Google may still show products it crawled from your online store, including ones not marked up with schema.org or added to Merchant Center. Google says crawl and indexing controls let you stop that at any time.

Related terms

• Rich results
• Structured data
• Google Business Profile

Tools for it

• Product feeds and reviews
• AI search and shopping visibility

Sources

• https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/13889434 (Oct 12, 2026)

Updated Oct 12, 2026.