Make your Google Merchant Center feed work for AI shopping
Merchant Center is the one feed that reaches three assistants, through Google's own answers and Perplexity's programme. The attributes Google calls optional are the ones that decide whether you come up.
Why the optional attributes decide it
A feed that passes Merchant Center's checks has an id, title, description, link, image, price and availability. A feed an assistant can match to a question also has colour, size, material, pattern, gender, age group, a product type and a precise Google product category, each with a value from Google's list rather than a free word. Your shoppers say sand; the taxonomy says Beige. A listing wants both, the shopper's word on the page and the standard value in the feed.
What to do
Fill every attribute your category defines, using the taxonomy's values. Keep the feed and the page agreeing on price and stock. Regenerate the feed when the data changes rather than on a weekly schedule the data has already outrun.
What Sighted does
Sighted writes the category attributes from your own descriptions, options and photos and maps each one to the closest standard value (a column dress becomes Sheath). It publishes a hosted Merchant Center feed in CSV and JSON, one item per variant (up to 100 a product), rebuilt after each enrichment run, and puts the same facts into your pages' Schema.org markup so Google reads one story in two places.
See how the assistants read your store.