In short. Product feed freshness depends on synchronizing product data submissions with website changes and keeping price and availability consistent through checkout.

Definition: Product feed freshness is the maintenance of current price and availability information in the product data submitted to a shopping service. It includes keeping that data consistent with the product page, its structured data, and checkout.

Key facts

As of 17 October 2026, Google's product data specification requires submitted prices and availability to match the landing page, structured data, and checkout.
Google's data quality guidance recommends submitting product data at the same time as website updates and coordinating scheduled fetches with those changes.
Google's automatic updates documentation describes corrections based on landing page data for Shopping ads and free listings, with regular product data updates still required.

Which values need to stay current?

A product feed is a data source containing product records submitted to Merchant Center. The product data specification identifies price and availability as required attributes. A price includes its currency; availability uses supported English values.

The following tab-separated fields combine the specification's examples for these attributes. They illustrate field formatting, rather than a complete product record:

price	availability
15.00 USD	in_stock

The supported availability values are in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder, and backorder. An out-of-stock product still needs a clearly visible price on its landing page.

For a sale, sale_price accompanies price, which retains the regular price. The optional sale_price_effective_date specifies the period during which the sale applies. Without that period, the specification says the sale price always applies. Freshness therefore includes the start and end of promotions as well as stock changes.

How should updates follow website changes?

Google's data quality guidance recommends creating the data source promptly after the product database changes, then submitting it alongside the website update. For scheduled fetches, the retrieval time should match regular website updates. If separate parts of a website update independently, Google recommends separate data sources submitted at the appropriate times.

For frequently changing inventory, the same guidance recommends the Merchant API, an interface for sending individual product updates to Google when information changes in the merchant's own system. When a third-party provider handles a data source, Google recommends preprocessing and uploading it as soon as possible after website changes.

What can automatic updates correct?

Google's automations documentation describes using structured data markup, machine-readable product information embedded in a page, and other website data to correct discrepancies. Price and availability checks use the product page supplied in the link attribute.

Google describes automations as handling sporadic accuracy problems affecting a small percentage of products. Frequent changes, including changes more than once per day, may exceed their capabilities; a mismatched product may be disapproved instead of updated.

Availability matching also has a specific limitation: when the submitted value is in_stock, Google treats website values of preorder or backorder as compatible and retains in_stock. Accurate source updates remain necessary even when automations are enabled.

FAQ

How can I check whether the page exposes the current price?

Google's verification guidance recommends providing price and availability directly in the HTTP response and using the URL Inspection tool to check rendering. If your page loads prices dynamically, display the final price only once it is available: an earlier displayed price may be interpreted as the correct one.

Which price belongs in structured data during a sale?

The same Google verification guidance says structured data should contain the price the consumer pays, including a sale price. Its automations guidance also recommends checking the sale period and timezone in sale_price_effective_date.

Sources

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