Google now takes your product questions straight from the feed. Which ones should you send?

What did Google add?

Google Merchant Center now has an optional product attribute called question_and_answer. Google's help page says it's primarily intended for conversational experiences such as AI Mode in Google Search, and it was reported by Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land in the last week of October 2026.

Each product can carry up to 30 question-and-answer pairs. A question can be up to 1,000 characters, an answer up to 1,000 characters, and all the pairs for one product together can't go over 10,000 characters. It works in all countries, and you can send it in your main product feed, a supplemental feed or through the Merchant API.

In plain terms: when someone asks Google's AI a detailed question about a product, Google now has a field where the store can supply the answer directly.

Will it help my products show up?

Google doesn't say this attribute affects ranking, and we won't guess. What it does do is give Google the store's own answer to a specific question, written by the people who know the product. If a shopper asks "does this fit a queen mattress with a topper?", the alternative is Google working it out from your description, a review, or a competitor's page.

So think of it less as a ranking trick and more as a way to stop being misquoted. That's worth doing for your best sellers and your most-returned products, even if nothing else changes.

There's a second, quieter benefit. Writing these answers forces a store to notice where its own product pages are vague. If your team can't agree on whether the blender handles frozen fruit, your customers can't either, and the fix belongs on the product page as well as in the feed.

Which questions should I send?

The best source for this attribute isn't your marketing copy. It's the last three months of your support inbox.

Look for questions people ask before they buy, the ones that end with "...so I'll order it then." Good candidates:

• Fit and compatibility. Does it fit, work with, or replace something the shopper already owns?
• What's in the box. Cables, refills, assembly hardware, the thing people assume is included.
• Use and care. Can it go in the dishwasher, be used outdoors, be washed cold?
• Who it's for. Age ranges, skill levels, sizes between sizes.
• Materials and ingredients, where the customer is checking for something specific.

Google's own example is a kettle: temperature settings, capacity, dimensions and weight, how long it keeps water warm, and its safety features. Notice that every answer is a fact that won't change next week.

The answer matters as much as the question. Compare two answers to "Will this fit a 30-inch vanity?":

• Weak: "Yes, it's designed to fit most standard vanities."
• Better: "It needs a vanity at least 30 inches wide and 21 inches deep. The faucet holes are 4 inches apart, so it works with a centerset faucet but not a widespread one."

The first one sounds friendly and tells the shopper nothing. The second one lets a person, or an AI answering on your behalf, give a real yes or no. Write answers the way your best support person would say them out loud: specific, short, and honest about the cases where the answer is no. A "no" answered clearly is often what saves a return.

What should I leave out?

Google is clear on several points:

• No prices and no dates. Anything time-related belongs in the attributes built for it. "Is this on sale?" and "When will it ship?" don't go here.
• No keyword lists. Write questions the way a person asks them.
• Don't repeat yourself. If the answer is already in the title, description, product detail or product highlight, Google says not to duplicate it here.
• Skip it if your documents already answer it. If you send a document link, such as a manual, and the same information is in it, Google says it will pull the FAQ from the document instead.

We'd add two of our own. Leave out anything you aren't sure is true for every unit you sell under that product, and anything your legal or compliance team would want to word carefully, such as health or safety claims, unless they've signed off.

How do I send it without making a mess?

Use a supplemental feed. Your main feed probably comes from your store platform and is hard to edit product by product. A supplemental feed, such as a Google Sheet keyed by product ID, lets one person own the questions and update them without touching anything else.

Mind the formatting. This is a repeated field with two parts, so colons, commas, quotes and backslashes inside your answers need escaping. Google recommends tab-separated files over comma-separated ones for exactly that reason. Test with five products, check Merchant Center for errors, then expand.

Start small. Pick twenty products: your best sellers and your most-returned. Write five to ten questions each. That's a week of part-time work, not a project.

If you sell variants, decide early whether the questions live on the parent product or on each variant. A question about fit may differ by size; a question about care usually doesn't. Matching the structure of your feed now saves a cleanup later.

How do I keep the answers true?

This is where most stores will slip. A product changes supplier, the cable is no longer in the box, the care instructions change, and the answer in the feed is still last year's. Now Google is confidently repeating something wrong, in your name.

Three habits help:

• One owner for the sheet, with a monthly reminder.
• A trigger in your product-change process: when the product page changes, the Q&A gets checked.
• A loop from support. When a customer says "but Google told me...", that's a question to add or fix.

If your product data lives across a store platform, a PIM and a spreadsheet, and you'd like the questions to stay in sync without someone copying them by hand, our ecommerce team builds those feeds. Get in touch and send us the three questions your customers ask most.

Related work: Spin Market.