EU product feed rules tighten in Google Merchant Center

What changed

Google's product data specification has shifted in several places that matter specifically to retailers selling into the EU. None of it arrived as a single announcement, which is part of the problem. The changes landed separately in the specification and are easy to miss if nobody on the team reads it line by line.

The first is energy labelling. Since April 2025, products sold into EU countries that require a graphical energy label are expected to carry the information through the certification attribute, which points at the product's EPREL registration. The older energy_efficiency_class attribute and its minimum and maximum variants now apply only to Switzerland, Norway and the UK, and no longer to products sold in the EU. The certification attribute takes an authority, a name and in most cases a code. For EU energy labels that means an authority of EC, a name of EPREL, and the EPREL registration number as the code.

The scope of EU energy labelling has also widened. Smartphones and tablets came into scope on 20 June 2025, and household tumble dryers were rescaled from 1 July 2025.

The second change covers AI generated content. Labelling rules now apply in the EU, in India and in New York. Generated images have to keep their embedded metadata, including the IPTC DigitalSourceType field. Generated titles and descriptions are expected to use the structured versions of those attributes, structured_title and structured_description, which carry a digital_source_type sub-attribute to declare how the text was produced.

The third is simpler but has a hard date. Google has set a minimum of 500 by 500 pixels for all product images, with enforcement starting on 31 January 2027.

Who this affects

Any retailer running free listings or Shopping ads into EU markets. The energy label part bites hardest on electronics, white goods and anything else carrying an EU energy class, which now includes a far broader set of consumer products than it did two years ago. The AI disclosure part affects a much wider group, because a large number of retailers have quietly started generating product copy and imagery without recording anywhere in their data that this is what happened.

What happens if you ignore it

It varies by attribute, which is why this is worth checking rather than assuming. A missing certification value does not get a product disapproved. Google may fill the gap itself from GTIN and MPN data, and a wrong value shows up as a warning in the Needs attention tab rather than a removal. The image minimum is different and will be enforced.

What to do about it

Start by finding out what you actually hold. Most of these requirements fail not because a retailer disagrees with them but because the field does not exist anywhere in the catalogue. EPREL registration numbers usually sit with the supplier and have never been imported. Nobody has recorded which descriptions were machine generated because nobody was asked to.

So the practical sequence is: audit the catalogue for the attributes the specification now expects, work out which of them have to come from suppliers and chase those, decide where generated content is in use and start recording it as a field rather than as a memory, and run the image set against the 500 pixel minimum well before the January 2027 date. Treat all of it as catalogue data rather than as a feed patch. A rule applied at the feed layer solves one channel. The same gap will appear again on the next one.