Google has extended attribute rules in Merchant Center to cover products the platform discovers automatically, according to reporting by Search Engine Roundtable on June 4, 2026. The change closes a gap that had existed since attribute rules launched: merchants could configure rules to standardize or override product data for items submitted through a manual feed, but those same rules had no effect on products Google pulled in by crawling a site’s pages or reading its structured data markup.
The practical split mattered more than it might appear. A merchant with a well-structured product catalog could find that feed-submitted items carried clean, rule-normalized attributes while automatically discovered versions of the same product appeared in Shopping surfaces with raw, uncleaned data. The two representations could differ on condition, price annotation, or product type, creating inconsistent presentations across placements and making it harder to audit what Google was actually showing.
Hana Kobzová, writing on PPC News Feed, reported that merchants are now seeing Merchant Center prompts to apply attribute rules to products discovered automatically from their online stores. The interface change, surfaced by Vojtěch Audy and initially documented in Czech, suggests Google has updated the Merchant Center UI to prompt merchants to extend their existing rule sets rather than requiring a separate configuration path.
The architectural reason this was a gap worth closing is that automatically found products have grown as a share of Merchant Center inventory. Google has pushed merchants toward the free listings program and has made auto-discovery part of the standard onboarding path for smaller retailers without dedicated feed management. A rule set that applied only to feed products therefore left a meaningful portion of many catalogs ungoverned.
For merchants who rely primarily on structured data (Product schema, offer markup, and similar implementations) rather than a submitted product feed, this change is particularly relevant. Structured-data-sourced products were among those falling outside attribute rule scope before this update. Those products now qualify, which means structured-data workflows can receive the same normalization pass as feed workflows.
What to check now: Open Merchant Center and review any attribute rules currently active on feed products. Confirm whether those rules also apply to your automatically found product set, and look for the prompt Kobzová described. If your catalog includes both feed-submitted and auto-discovered products, audit whether the attribute values currently being used for automatically found items are accurate, since they may have been outside any rule scope until now. Merchants who have not used attribute rules at all should treat this as a prompt to evaluate whether their auto-found inventory is presenting with the attributes they intend.
The announcement does not include any Google-published documentation about the scope of the rollout or whether it is complete across all accounts.
Search Engine Roundtable, reporting by Barry Schwartz, published June 4, 2026, first surfaced a Merchant Center UI change extending attribute rules to automatically found products.
