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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.

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    structured-data/advanced-product-details

    Advanced product details

    What it checks

    AI agents use a product’s name, brand, category, and availability status to filter search results and answer availability queries. A Product without a name cannot be matched to a catalog entry at all; missing brand, category or availability makes it less likely to surface in filtered AI recommendations.

    Why it matters

    Google’s product data extractors read brand, category and the Offer’s availability from a product page’s schema.org markup. availability is pulled into Merchant Center and used to correct the item’s stock state. A page that omits it leaves the stock state to be inferred rather than read.

    Evidence

    • Merchant listing structured data lists brand.name, category (“Specifies the product’s categories”, Text or CategoryCode) and offers.availability among the properties Google reads; required are only Product name, image, offers and the Offer’s price/priceCurrency pair — developers.google.com/…/merchant-listing (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Automatic item updates: “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 covered attributes are price, sale price, availability (schema.org ItemAvailability) and itemCondition — support.google.com/…/3246284 (verified 2026-08-21)
    • “Structured data lets Google and other web platforms automatically read your site and directly pull product data from your HTML”; “Structured data must match the values that are shown to the customer” — support.google.com/…/6069143 (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Agent-side shopping indexes model the same fields: OpenAI’s product feed spec makes availability (in_stock/out_of_stock/pre_order/backorder/unknown) and brand required fields — developers.openai.com/…/feed (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Product snippets list brand among recommended properties — developers.google.com/…/product-snippet (verified 2026-08-21)

    Limits

    The three measured properties are not equally proven. availability has an explicit documented extraction-and-use path. brand and category are only listed as recommended, and no vendor documents a feature that category powers — Google’s own Product Category codes are a Merchant Center feed attribute. Making category pass-blocking therefore exceeds the evidence. (This corrects the code-review note above, which said category is absent from Google’s Product documentation. It is present, as a recommended property.) schema.org places availability on Offer rather than on Product, so crediting Product.availability rewards invalid markup (developers.google.com/…/merchant-listing).

    And Google states of its AI features: “There’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add” (developers.google.com/…/ai-features, verified 2026-08-21), so the “filtered AI recommendations” framing has no documented consumer; the proven consumer is Google’s shopping pipeline.

    How it scores

    All three measured properties appear in Google’s documented merchant-listing property tables, and availability specifically is named in the automatic-item-updates extraction path, which is documented consumer behavior rather than convention.

    Sources