Is Google Merchant Center free? Free listings vs Shopping ads
Yes — Google Merchant Center is free, and so is the most important thing it does: free listings. You only pay if you choose to run Shopping ads on top. Here’s how the pieces fit together.
What Merchant Center is
Merchant Center is where you give Google your product data — titles, prices, images, availability — and your business details. Google uses it to show your products across its surfaces, for free and in ads.
Free listings: products on Google at no cost
With free listings, your products can appear at no cost on:
- Google Search and the Shopping tab;
- Google Images and Lens;
- YouTube;
- Google Maps (for in-store products);
- Gemini.
Free listings show your product pages — not your homepage, policies or category pages — and work for both online and in-store products.
New accounts are opted in to free listings by default. You can change the setting in the Free listings tab (you need Admin access).
What free listings need
- The required product attributes, such as ID, title, link, image, price, description and availability.
- Shipping settings, or shipping costs in your product data. In many countries — including the US, UK, Canada, Australia and much of Europe — this is required.
- A verified and claimed website — see Google Merchant Center website verification.
- Return policy information is recommended.
Shopping ads: the paid option
Shopping ads give you more control and visibility in Shopping results than free listings. You run them through Google Ads:
- Link (or create) a Google Ads account in Merchant Center.
- Add a payment method in Google Ads.
- Create a campaign — Shopping or Performance Max — and select your Merchant Center account, budget and bidding.
Adding products to Merchant Center doesn’t automatically put them in an ad campaign — ads are a separate step.
Getting started
- Create a Merchant Center account and enter your business details.
- Verify and claim your website.
- Set up shipping (and returns).
- Add products — through a platform like Shopify, a spreadsheet, or a feed (see Google Merchant Center XML feed).
- Check each product’s status for issues — see Google Merchant Center product status.