Opens in a new tabSkip to content
Agent LighthouseAgent Lighthouse

    Searches the text of every published page. The evidence sources themselves are not in this index — search all of them on the trusted sources page.

    GitHub ↗
    Browse checks and page contents
    agentic-commerce/product-transaction-certainty

    Product transactional certainty

    What it checks

    AI shopping assistants need more than a product name and price to make an authoritative recommendation. Before they commit a user to a purchase, they must know whether the item is in stock, how long the quoted price is valid, and what the return policy is. A Product schema that only carries name and price forces agents to guess at availability, quote potentially stale prices, and stay silent on returns — all of which erode transactional certainty in agentic commerce flows. Complete your Offer with availability, priceValidUntil, and a valid price + priceCurrency pair, and attach hasMerchantReturnPolicy to the Product or Offer.

    Why it matters

    Google’s merchant-listing structured-data spec names all four measured Offer properties — price with priceCurrency, availability, priceValidUntil and hasMerchantReturnPolicy — as properties its extractors read from the page. Google also acts on them: price and availability are pulled into Merchant Center by automatic item updates, and a priceValidUntil date in the past suppresses the product snippet. An Offer missing them therefore yields a listing whose stock state, price validity and return terms cannot be machine-read.

    Evidence

    • Merchant listing structured data requires Product name, image and offers, and on the Offer, price (or priceSpecification.price) and priceCurrency. It recommends and parses three more: availability, priceValidUntil (“The date and time after which the price will no longer be available”) and hasMerchantReturnPolicy (“Nested information about the return policies associated with an Offer”) — developers.google.com/…/merchant-listing (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Automatic item updates read the markup off the page: “We automatically read the structured data markup on your website using our advanced data extractors and directly pull product data from your HTML into Merchant Center.” The fields covered are price, sale price, availability and itemCondition — support.google.com/…/3246284 (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Google acts on priceValidUntil: “Your product snippet may not display if the priceValidUntil property indicates a past date” — developers.google.com/…/product-snippet (verified 2026-08-21)
    • The same transactional fields are what an agent checkout surface stores: OpenAI’s product feed spec makes price (number + ISO 4217 currency) and availability required, and requires return_policy (return policy URL) when is_eligible_checkout is true — developers.openai.com/…/feed (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Agentic Commerce Protocol, “developed by Stripe and OpenAI” as an open standard for agent-initiated checkout, is the emerging transaction path these fields feed — agenticcommerce.dev (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Merchant Center price guidance requires the page’s structured data to agree with the displayed and checkout price — support.google.com/…/7052112 (verified 2026-08-21)

    Limits

    The documented behavior around priceValidUntil argues against requiring it. Google treats it as optional, and suppresses the snippet once the date passes, so an unmaintained date is worse than none. The audit’s 4/4 pass gate therefore pushes merchants toward a field that can cost them the very listing it is supposed to secure (developers.google.com/…/product-snippet). hasMerchantReturnPolicy is a merchant-listing property, not a universal Product property, and Google prefers organization-level return policies over per-offer ones (developers.google.com/…/merchant-listing).

    No AI-assistant vendor documents reading this bundle from page markup. OpenAI ingests price, availability and return policy through a merchant feed or API: “Provide a structured product feed so ChatGPT accurately indexes and displays your products with up-to-date price and availability” (developers.openai.com/commerce). Google states of its AI features that “There’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add” (developers.google.com/…/ai-features, verified 2026-08-21). The four-signal “transactional certainty” composite is this project’s construct; the evidence supports the individual properties, not the bundle as a threshold.

    How it scores

    Every property in the measured bundle has documented consumer behavior from a named vendor pipeline, with price/priceCurrency required and the other three documented as read.

    Sources