@tjrobertson52

If you want your products or services to show up in Google's AI search results, which is going to be all of their search results soon, Google wants you to share more information with them.

I want to talk about the new conversational attributes they've added to Google Merchant Center, what this means for e-commerce businesses, and what we can expect for all businesses moving forward. Conversational attributes are something that Google announced back in January, but they just announced that they're officially here.

These are new optional attributes that you can share with Google inside of Google Merchant Center, and they're specifically intended to give AI agents more information about your products. These are things like common questions and answers around a specific product; extensive documentation on the product, maybe in the form of a PDF; or a popularity rating denoting how popular a product is relative to your other products.

Now, to implement these, you don't need to touch your primary feed at all. You can just provide a supplementary feed that provides the additional information. So if you're in e-commerce business, I highly recommend that you set up this feed and add as much information as possible about your products.

Google says commerce is becoming conversational. People are gonna have very specific information about your products. If you have answers that your competitors don't, you'll just win by default.

But this also has implications for service businesses and SaaS companies. Humans are doing more and more of their research and decision making through an AI agent. For this to work well, you want that AI agent to have access to as much information as possible about your products, services, and business.

Putting all that information on your main product page or service page should be overwhelming for the human visitors. Our solution for now has been to build supplemental pages with the additional information, and then you can link from your main page to the supplemental pages.

Now, humans typically aren't gonna click all over your website trying to find information, but AI agents will. However, it's not surprising that Google wants to get that information off your website and into their own product, Google Merchant Center.

I would be surprised if we don't see something similar happening with Google Business Profile. This potentially gives Google information about your products and services that their competitors can't access, and it makes you more dependent on Google.

My advice: both keep Google whatever information they're asking for within their own products, but also find some way to put that information on your website. At the very least, start collecting and documenting as much information as possible about your product, services, and business.

It's hard to predict the exact shape of the future, but we can be confident that having this documentation is going to be incredibly valuable, both for internal use and for being found online.