In-store inventory automatically added from your online shop to Merchant Center

Having your inventory added automatically to Merchant Center is a faster and easier way to start or test your local inventory ads and free local listings without building your own inventory data. It helps you onboard to local inventory ads and free local listings efficiently by automatically generating inventory data for you.

On this page:

• How it works
• Requirements
• Implementation
• Stop 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 shops pairs per day. You can prevent specific products from showing in local inventory ads and free local listings by using the excluded destination [excluded_destination] attribute in your primary data source and the value “Local_inventory_ads” and "[Free_local_listings]".
• 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.

Stop local inventory "Found by Google"

If you wish to stop the local inventory extraction, follow the instructions below:

In your Merchant Center account, click the Settings & 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 you want to stop the local inventory extraction.

Select “Add inventory”.

Select “Stop automatic inventory”.

Confirm you want to stop inventory extraction.

By stopping 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.

A second method to stop the local inventory extraction is by removing the Data Source. This will remove local data from all countries.

In your Merchant Center account:

• Click the Settings and tools icon , then select Data Sources.
• Select Product Sources.
• In the "Found by Google" section, select the Local inventory tab.
• Click the 3-dot icon and select Stop showing in-store products found by Google.
• Confirm you want to stop the inventory extraction.

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?

Why hasn’t a specific product been extracted from my website?

How can I troubleshoot the Google StoreBot crawler not being able to extract my local inventory?

I see “Adding inventory found by Google” in my account for over 48 hours. What should I do?

Ensure your product data source is opted into local inventory ads and free local listings. You can follow the below instructions:

In your Merchant Center account, click on the Settings & tools icon in the top right.

Click Data sources.

On the “Primary sources” tab, click on your product source name.

Under “Data source setup”, check that the “Marketing methods” is opted into “Local inventory ads” or “Free local listings”.

If not, click on the pencil icon , select “Local inventory ads” or “Free local listings” and click Save.

If you meet all these requirements but inventory hasn't been added, please contact our support team.