Google confirmed it is piloting a countdown label on Shopping ads that tells shoppers how many days remain on a promotion. A screenshot shared by Sachin Patel showed a sponsored listing marked “5 days left,” visible directly beneath the product price.
A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Roundtable the feature is “a very early experiment,” declining to share a rollout timeline or eligibility criteria. That leaves advertisers unable to opt in or test the format themselves for now.
Merchant Center already lets retailers annotate when a deal ends, a capability the platform expanded earlier this year. The new label looks like the first ad-surface use of that data, turning a backend inventory signal into a visible scarcity cue at the point of click.
Urgency messaging is a familiar conversion lever in e-commerce landing pages. Testing it natively inside the ad unit itself would be new territory for Google Shopping, shifting some of that psychological pressure earlier in the funnel.
Merchants running time-bound promotions should keep their Merchant Center deal-end dates current, since accurate feed data is what would make any eventual countdown label trustworthy rather than misleading.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the test on September 11, 2026.
