What is Product feed?

A product feed is the structured file or API stream that supplies product data to a shopping surface — Google Merchant Center, Meta Catalog, TikTok Shop, or a marketplace — with each row carrying identifiers, title, description, price, availability, and image URLs.

Feed quality determines whether products can be matched to demand at all, so it acts as a gate in front of everything spent downstream. Failures are usually mundane and expensive: missing GTINs suppressing eligibility, stale availability driving spend to out-of-stock items, titles written for a brand's own site rather than for search, or image URLs that resolve slowly and fail ingestion. Titles and attributes deserve the most attention because they carry the matching signal, and the convention that performs is descriptive and front-loaded — brand, product type, then the distinguishing attributes a shopper would actually type. The emerging change is that AI shopping assistants consume this same data for semantic rather than keyword matching, which rewards richer attribute coverage — materials, use cases, dimensions, compatibility — beyond the minimum a traditional feed specification requires.