Google Free Listings: How to Get Products Shown for Free

Google free listings are unpaid product results built from your Merchant Center data or your product pages. They can appear on the Shopping tab, in Search, Images, Lens, YouTube and Gemini. In Merchant Center, you set up business details, a verified website and, in 30 countries, shipping settings. You also need a return policy on your site, and product data that passes review. Google opts new accounts in by default. It decides what to show: it matches products to searches using your data and shows only the products it has.

This guide covers the free side of Google Shopping: where free listings appear, how they differ from ads, what to set up and how to read the results. Our Merchant Center guide covers the account itself, from verification to product statuses.

What are Google free listings?

A free listing is a product result you don’t pay for. Google shows the product’s title, image, price and availability next to offers from other stores. A click takes the shopper to your product page to buy.

Free listings on the Shopping tab started in April 2020. Google announced that results on the Shopping tab would consist primarily of free listings, first in the US (It’s now free to sell on Google). In September 2020, it extended them to countries across Europe, Asia and Latin America, with the change in effect by mid-October (Free listings will soon be available across the world, archived Merchant Center announcement). Shopping ads stayed: they still appear in the ad slots of the Shopping tab.

In Merchant Center, free listings are a programme your account takes part in. The Merchant API lists free-listings next to shopping-ads and gives each programme a state: not eligible, eligible or enabled (REST Resource: accounts.programs). Merchant Center now calls the places where products appear “marketing methods”. Older guides call them “destinations” or “Surfaces across Google”.

Where do free listings appear on Google?

Google’s help page names Search, Maps, Images, Lens, YouTube, Gemini, the Shopping tab and the products module on Business Profile (Free listings for products). Some formats work only in certain countries. The table sums up what that page says about each format.

The last row comes from Google Search Central (Where ecommerce content can appear on Google).

Two things follow for a store in Europe. First, Google lists the Shopping Knowledge Panel and popular products only for countries outside Europe. So in Europe, the free formats with confirmed availability are the Shopping tab, rich results, Images and Lens. Second, free listings help product pages appear, not home pages, category pages or shipping and return policy pages.

How are free listings different from Shopping ads?

Both use the same product data, but they sit in different places and you run them differently. A Shopping ad gets each impression by winning an auction. A free listing is an organic result that no bid can buy.

Free listings matter most for the products your ads leave out. In our study of 1.4 million products, 55.0% of the products in 130+ stores received no ad budget at all over 13 months. Those products got no paid clicks, so any clicks they got from Google’s product results came from free listings.

We build campaign structures with this in mind. Under GetProfit’s product classification rules, a new product that Google has barely shown stays out of paid campaigns for now. It keeps its free listings and spends no budget. Our comparison of free listings vs Shopping ads covers what free traffic adds for a store that already advertises, and when a product should stay free-only.

What do you need to set up in Merchant Center for free listings?

Setup takes six steps. The account-level steps are the same as for ads, so each step here says what it means for free listings and what to check next.

1. Create the account in the right country. One Google Account email can create only one Merchant Center account. You can’t change the country you pick during setup (Get started with Merchant Center). Check that it is the country where your business is registered.
2. Add business details and verify your website. Verifying tells Google you own the site, and in most cases you do it once (About online store URL verification). Merchant Center may cross-check your content with the Google Search index. So check in Search Console that Google has indexed your product pages and that shoppers can buy the products on them (How to launch a new ecommerce website).
3. Set up shipping. According to Google’s Free listings for products page, you need shipping settings or a shipping attribute in 30 countries, including Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, the UK and the US. Google’s Product data specification gives a shorter list of 21 countries, without Slovakia. Check that the costs match what your checkout charges.
4. Publish a return policy on your website. Free listings require it, and Google also recommends adding it in Merchant Center. Check that shoppers can reach the policy page from every product page.
5. Add your product data. At sign-up, Google can add products automatically from your online store. You can also connect a platform such as Shopify or upload a product feed. Every product needs an ID, title, link, image link, price, description and availability. Add the brand where the product has one, a GTIN where the manufacturer assigned one, and an MPN for products without a GTIN. Apparel also needs colour, size, age group and gender, and variants need an item group ID. Check the Needs attention tab on the Products page for issues.
6. Confirm the Free listings card is on. Go to Marketing → Marketing methods and look at the “Free listings” card. It is on by default in most accounts, and only a user with Admin access can change it. The card gives Google permission to show your products. Whether they show is still up to Google.

If your site goes live before you can take orders, Google suggests sending your products with the excluded_destination attribute. Verification issues then appear early, and your products don’t show as available on Google Shopping.

Which product data decides how much of your catalogue shows?

Google matches products to searches using the data you send. Wrong or missing data can lead to disapprovals, limited eligibility or incorrect display, and it can stop both ads and free listings from showing (Product data specification).

Google sets a product’s status per marketing method and per country. In the Merchant API, a product can be approved for free listings and disapproved for Shopping ads, or the other way round. An issue can also demote a product instead of disapproving it. Google says a demoted product most likely has limited performance in search results (REST Resource: accounts.products).

The portal’s feed score checks the same fields that free listings depend on. It adds up nine of them using the portal’s own weights, not Google’s: approval 22 · GTIN 16 · images 14 · title and description 14 · category 12 · brand 8 · price 8 · availability 4 · condition 2. Approval carries the most weight because a disapproved product doesn’t show at all. The share of products that pass review is your approval rate.

Identifiers do extra work in free results. Google asks for a GTIN, or an MPN with the brand, so it can add your product correctly to the Shopping Knowledge Panel. Our feed optimisation guide sets out which fields to fix first.

Data decides whether a product can show. Which store’s listing shows first for a query is a separate question, and Google Shopping SEO answers it.

Can Google show your products without a feed?

Yes. According to Google’s Free listings for products page, products crawled from your online store can show across Google even without schema.org markup or a Merchant Center upload. That stays true even if you turn free listings off. To stop it, use crawl and indexing controls on your site.

Google Search Central describes two routes (Share your product data with Google). Smaller sites that change rarely can use an automated feed built from crawled pages. Larger sites, or sites that change often, should upload feed files on a schedule. Crawling can miss some products, and Google doesn’t promise how fast it processes crawled changes.

Our article on Merchant Center autofeeds explains where crawled products come from and when relying on them becomes a risk.

Crawled data is only as good as your product pages. Only pages where a shopper can buy the product are eligible for merchant listings. If JavaScript generates your product markup, Shopping crawls can become less frequent and less reliable (Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data).

Google’s Shopping crawler is Storebot-Google. Robots.txt rules addressed to it affect all Shopping surfaces, including the Shopping tab (List of Google’s common crawlers). If your CDN or other bot protection challenges bots, check that it lets Google through: our guide shows how to verify Googlebot and Storebot.

Free clicks fell almost as far as the number of products Google showed

A poster store we worked with lost most of its free listing traffic in 2025. We pulled its Merchant Center data for the German market through the API. These are one store’s numbers: an observation, not an experiment.

Clicks fell almost as far as the number of products Google showed. Over the same months, a large share of the store’s product pages dropped out of Google’s index. The data pointed to a smaller catalogue in Google rather than a demotion of the products that remained. Our free listings traffic drop case shows how we told the two apart.

Two details from that account matter for any store. First, in April 2026, about 1.49 million of its products in Merchant Center came from Google’s crawl of the site, against about 52,000 from its feed. So the products Google could show depended on which pages stayed in its index.

Second, Search Console data filtered to merchant listings pointed the other way: it showed growth. But it covered only hundreds of clicks in web search. Merchant Center counted tens of thousands, and those had fallen.

The lesson: free visibility starts with coverage, meaning how many of your products Google has and can show. Check that count before you work on titles or prices.

How do you see what free listings bring?

You can filter Merchant Center’s Performance page to free listings. Underneath, the Merchant API splits clicks and impressions by marketing method, ads or organic, for each product and each day (Performance reports). In that report, conversions and conversion value are available only for free traffic (ProductPerformanceView).

Keep two cautions in mind. First, the Search Console merchant listings report checks Product structured data for errors and warnings; for free listings traffic, use Merchant Center. Second, product rows and daily account totals can disagree: product rows can show far fewer impressions for the same clicks. So the portal takes daily totals from a separate report instead of adding up product rows.

Our guide on where to see free listings performance explains which numbers to trust in Merchant Center, Search Console and GA4.

The portal’s feed section reads this split from Merchant Center product by product. It shows where your products appear, in ads or in free listings, how that changes over time and which products get little traffic.

A worked example: which approved products get no clicks at all

Example store, not client data.

A tableware store has 3,000 products, and 2,850 of them are approved. Over a month, Merchant Center’s performance data, split by product and marketing method, shows organic clicks on 950 products and ad clicks on 1,100. Since 600 products appear in both lists, 1,450 products got at least one click from Google.

The other 1,400 products, 49% of the approved ones, got no clicks from either source. Start with that list: check their titles, identifiers, images and prices first.

How do you keep a product out of free listings?

Use the product data, not the stock status. Google’s Product data specification gives three rules:

• To exclude a product from free listings for a long time, set excluded_destination to Free_listings. It works per product and leaves your ads untouched.
• For a short pause in ads, use the pause attribute. A product can stay paused for up to 14 days; after that, Google disapproves it.
• Don’t set availability to out_of_stock to hide a product. Google asks you not to use availability as a pause.

Turning off the Free listings card doesn’t remove products that Google crawled from your site. Crawl and indexing controls do.

What do the free listings policies cover?

Free listings have their own policies, in four areas: prohibited content, prohibited practices, restricted content and site requirements (Free listings policies). When a listing breaks them, Google can disapprove it or limit how visible the account’s offers are. Repeat or egregious violations can lead to account suspension. The policies list sites that offer little unique value and focus mainly on generating traffic as abuse of the free listings network.

What changes with AI search and AI checkout?

Google’s guide to its AI features says generative AI responses can include product listings and product information. Merchant Center feeds can help your products appear in those responses and in other Search results (Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search). The same guide says ordinary SEO still applies, and that AI features need neither structured data nor any special markup.

To see what a store can control in AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini and ChatGPT, read products in AI search. Whether your paid campaigns already show inside AI answers is a separate question: see Shopping ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Outside Google, ChatGPT shopping explains how products get into ChatGPT’s answers and what data OpenAI asks for.

UCP, the Universal Commerce Protocol, is what Google uses for direct buying in AI Mode and Gemini (Google Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) Guide). Checkout inside AI answers already has a place in Merchant Center data: the Merchant API has a reporting context for free product listings on UCP checkout (ReportingContextEnum). The API’s list of programmes also includes ucp-integration, with limited access. Our guide to agentic commerce: UCP and ACP covers whether a store outside the US can use AI checkout yet.

What to check in your account this week

1. The Free listings card. Marketing → Marketing methods. It has to be on, and only an Admin can change it.
2. Shipping for every country you sell to. Free listings require it in 30 countries, including Czechia, Slovakia and Poland. Without it, products can’t take part in those countries.
3. The return policy on your website. Free listings require it, and shoppers should be able to reach it from every product page.
4. Four counts. Products on your site, in Merchant Center, approved for free listings, and with at least one organic click last month. The largest gap shows where you lose free visibility.
5. Issues on the Needs attention tab. Fix disapprovals first, then demotions: a demoted product can still show, but most likely less.
6. Identifiers. A GTIN, or an MPN with the brand, on every product that has one. Google asks for them to add products correctly to the Shopping Knowledge Panel, where that format exists.
7. Crawling. Product pages indexed in Search Console, and your bot protection letting Googlebot and Storebot-Google through.
8. Ads and organic side by side, once a month, product by product. Products with clicks from neither source are your first list to work on.

See what Google doesn’t see in your catalogue. Sign in with Google in one click — both Google Ads and Merchant Center. We change nothing, neither in your account nor in the feed, without your consent.

Check your feed →

Sources

• Free listings for products — Google Merchant Center Help: where free listings appear and in which countries; on by default for new accounts; the Free listings card under Marketing methods and Admin access; permission, not a guarantee; product pages only; requirements, required attributes and the 30 countries where shipping is required; crawled products can show even with free listings off; the Performance page filter. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Product data specification — Google Merchant Center Help: missing or wrong data limits ads and free listings; the 21 countries where shipping costs are required; excluded_destination with Free_listings; the pause attribute and its 14-day limit; availability not to be used as a pause. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Free listings policies — Google Merchant Center Help: the four policy areas and how Google enforces them. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Get started with Merchant Center — Google Merchant Center Help: one account per Google Account email; the country can’t be changed; automatic product import from the online store. Checked 2 October 2026.
• About online store URL verification — Google Merchant Center Help: what verifying a website means; usually done once. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Free listings will soon be available across the world — Google Merchant Center announcement of 29 September 2020, archived copy: free listings on the Shopping tab in Europe, Asia and Latin America by mid-October 2020; “Surfaces across Google”. Checked 2 October 2026.
• It’s now free to sell on Google — Google blog, 21 April 2020: Shopping tab results to consist primarily of free listings, starting in the US. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Where ecommerce content can appear on Google — Google Search Central: Maps needs inventory location data in Merchant Center. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Share your product data with Google — Google Search Central: automated feeds for smaller sites, feed files for larger ones; crawling doesn’t find every product or guarantee update speed. Checked 2 October 2026.
• How to launch a new ecommerce website — Google Search Central: Merchant Center may cross-check content with the Search index; launching with excluded_destination. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data — Google Search Central: only pages where the product can be bought; JavaScript markup and Shopping crawls; the Search Console merchant listings report. Checked 2 October 2026.
• List of Google’s common crawlers — Google crawling documentation: Storebot-Google and the Shopping surfaces it affects. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search — Google Search Central: AI responses can include product listings; Merchant Center feeds help; structured data not required. Checked 2 October 2026.
• REST Resource: accounts.programs — Merchant API reference: the free-listings programme and its states; the ucp-integration programme. Checked 2 October 2026.
• REST Resource: accounts.products — Merchant API reference: status per reporting context and country; demoted and disapproved issues. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Performance reports — Merchant API documentation: clicks and impressions per product, split by marketing method. Checked 2 October 2026.
• ProductPerformanceView — Merchant API reference: conversions available only for free traffic. Checked 2 October 2026.
• ReportingContextEnum — Merchant API reference: the reporting context for free product listings on UCP checkout. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Google Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) Guide — Google for Developers: UCP enables direct buying in AI Mode in Google Search and Gemini. Checked 2 October 2026.
• GetProfit study of 1,404,808 products, 130+ stores, 13 months — share of products that received no ad budget.
• GetProfit investigation of one poster store’s free listings, Merchant Center data for the German market, January–August 2025 — products shown, impressions and clicks; crawl and feed product counts.
• GetProfit product classification rules for campaign structure (specification of 26 August 2026) — new products with almost no impressions stay out of paid campaigns.
• GetProfit portal methodology — feed score weights; Merchant Center performance read by product, day and marketing method.