Enable automatic improvements
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Google can update your products, images, and shipping estimates automatically based on your website's landing page.

Automatic improvements are off by default, but available for Shopping ads and free listings. This guide explains how to enable automatic improvements for your Merchant Center account, and the results of doing so.

You can view the automatic improvements settings for your account in the AutomaticItemUpdates resource.

Item updates

Automatic item updates lead to an improved user experience, more traffic to your products, and higher conversion rates because customers see the correct price and availability of your products in your Shopping ads or free listings. For more information, see About automatic item updates.

Google uses the structured data markup we find on your website, and advanced data extractors, to update the following attributes of your products:

availability: Google updates the availability of Shopping products to out_of_stock if we find an out_of_stock annotation on your website. If you want Google to update out_of_stock Shopping products to in_stock based on your website too, set allowStrictAvailabilityUpdates to true.
condition: Google updates the condition of your Shopping products based on the information found on your website.
price: Google updates the price of active products based on the prices found on your website.
strictAvailability: Google updates the availability of out_of_stock Shopping products to in_stock if we find an in_stock annotation on your website. You must also enable availability updates. If you use out_of_stock to prevent traffic to specific in-stock items, for example, items with low stock, you may want to turn off strict availability updates by setting allowStrictAvailabilityUpdates to false.

Use the accountItemUpdatesSettings resource to manage automatic item updates for your account.

Updates can come in multiple ways:

From account-level settings
From the advanced account by being inherited
Exist as a default option for the account

If a sub-account does not have automatic item update settings, it inherits settings from the advanced account. You can check the current settings for your account in the fields that start with effective in accountItemUpdates.

Fields that start with effective are read-only, and show the current setting for your account. If you change the accountItemUpdatesSettings for your sub-account, the fields that start with effective reflect your changes instead of the inherited settings.

Here's a sample accountItemUpdates resource:

{
  "accountItemUpdatesSettings": {
      "allowPriceUpdates": true,
      "allowAvailabilityUpdates": false,
      "allowStrictAvailabilityUpdates": false
      "allowConditionUpdates": true
  },
  "effectiveAllowPriceUpdates": true,
  "effectiveAllowAvailabilityUpdates": false,
  "effectiveAllowStrictAvailabilityUpdates": false
  "effectiveConditionUpdates": true
}

Images

Automatic image improvements update your product images to improve quality, and ensure they meet requirements. Image improvements only apply to disapproved products. For example, Google can automatically remove image overlays. If successful, it updates and approves the image.

Use the accountImageImprovementSettings resource to manage automatic image improvements for your account.

If a sub-account does not have automatic image improvement settings, it inherits settings from the advanced account. You can check the account settings in the effectiveAllowAutomaticImageImprovements field of accountImageImprovements.

If you change the settings for a sub-account, effectiveAllowAutomaticImageImprovements reflects your changes instead of the inherited settings.

For more information, see Allow Merchant Center to improve your product images.

Here's a sample response that shows image improvements enabled:

{
    "accountImageImprovementsSettings": {
        "allowAutomaticImageImprovements": true
    }
    "effectiveAllowAutomaticImageImprovements": true
}

Shipping

Google can automatically update your estimated delivery time based on your historical performance, rather than the estimates in your shipping settings. The performance-based estimates show on Shopping ads and free listings.

Use the accountShippingImprovements field to manage automatic shipping improvements. Set allowShippingImprovements to true to allow Google to automatically update your estimated delivery time.

This is not available for advanced accounts and this setting isn't inheritable for sub-accounts.

For more information about automatic shipping estimates, see I want Google to calculate my shipping speeds based on my carrier.

Here's an example:

{
    "allowShippingImprovements": true
}

There are no effective fields for AutomaticItemUpdates because it does not inherit shipping improvements.

Learn more

For the details of the methods, see

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