In-store inventory automatically added from your online store 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 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 stores, 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 stores.

• You must not block Google crawlers such as Google StoreBot and Googlebot from crawling your website.

• Google will crawl the top product or store 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 stores, 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 & 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 pause the local inventory extraction.

Select “Add inventory”.

Select “Pause automatic inventory”.

Confirm 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