Product Schema & Merchant Listings for visible-content-aligned structured data.

Usually a mismatch between the feed and the landing page — price, availability or currency differing from what the page renders — or a missing required attribute such as GTIN, brand or condition. Google re-crawls the landing page and compares, so the fix is almost always making the feed reflect live catalogue data rather than editing the feed in isolation.

For products that have them, yes — omitting a GTIN that exists reduces matching and can affect eligibility. Genuinely custom or handmade goods without a manufacturer identifier are exempt, but the identifier_exists attribute must be set correctly rather than left blank, which is treated as an error rather than an exemption.

Generated from the same catalogue data the storefront reads. A manually maintained spreadsheet drifts within weeks — price changes and stock movements do not propagate, disapprovals accumulate, and nobody notices until traffic falls. Generation also makes currency, availability and variant handling consistent by construction.

Review markup is only eligible when the reviews are genuinely collected, visible on the page, and about the product being marked up. Self-serving reviews about the business on a product page, or aggregated ratings a visitor cannot see, breach the structured data policies and can cost eligibility across the site rather than just that page.

Yes, and that is the reliable route to volume — a timed request after delivery rather than at order confirmation. What matters is not filtering by expected sentiment: routing happy customers to a public review and unhappy ones to a private form is review gating, which breaches most platforms' policies and can result in removal.

Because platforms expect a specific relationship between the parent product and its variants, and most catalogues model it differently. Size and colour need consistent attribute naming, each variant needs its own identifier and availability, and the item_group_id has to be stable. Inconsistent variant data is the most common source of large-scale disapprovals.

No. It makes a product eligible for specific result presentations and helps systems interpret price, availability and rating correctly. Correct interpretation can affect which queries a page is considered relevant for, but markup is not a ranking factor and adding more of it does not improve position.

Nominate the catalogue as the single source of truth and have every channel read from it, rather than maintaining separate copies. Where a platform caches, use its update API rather than waiting for a scheduled fetch. Discrepancies between the page and the feed are the leading cause of both disapprovals and abandoned checkouts.