Product feed — a structured file listing every product a store sells, with its attributes: title, description, price, availability, identifiers such as GTIN, images, variants and shipping.
Why it matters more than it used to
Feeds have powered Google Shopping for years through Merchant Center. They are now also how products reach AI assistants. OpenAI accepts product feeds from merchants for ChatGPT’s shopping results, and says those results are selected independently and are not ads. Google added Merchant Center attributes in January 2026 built for conversational shopping, such as answers to common product questions. Shopify syndicates eligible merchants’ catalogs automatically through Shopify Catalog.
What a good one has
- Titles that say what the product is, not only what it is called.
- Every attribute a buyer would filter on — size, material, compatibility, dimensions — as data, not buried in a paragraph.
- Price and availability updated often enough that an assistant never recommends something you cannot ship.
- Shipping and return policies stated plainly, because agents compare those too.
The feed and the product page should agree. When they don’t, you are asking a machine to decide which version of you to believe. See structured data.
Sources: OpenAI Help Center, Shopping with ChatGPT search · OpenAI Developers, Product feeds · Google, 11 Jan 2026.
Related: agentic commerce, structured data, Agentic Commerce Protocol, Universal Commerce Protocol.