Preflight product-page merchant listing markup

Updated

A product page can contain valid JSON while describing the wrong price or an expired offer. A local snapshot check helps find a bounded set of these issues before you run Google's own tests. It cannot prove that a live page will qualify for or display a merchant listing.

The free merchant listing markup preflight reads pasted or locally chosen UTF-8 HTML as inert text. Synthetic examples demonstrate both a clean supported subset and deliberate issues. No snapshot is rendered, uploaded or saved by the tool. It does not crawl URLs, connect to Google, change markup or update a feed.

Separate page markup from feed data

On-page structured data describes a product through markup such as Product and Offer JSON-LD. A Merchant Center product feed is a separate data source with its own attributes, diagnostics and review. This tool checks only the supplied page snapshot, not the feed. Fixing one source does not show that the other is correct. Review both against the product shoppers can actually buy.

Review the supported Product and Offer fields

  1. Product identity: confirm a nonblank name and an appropriate image. The tool recognizes absolute HTTP(S) image URLs and ImageObject URLs, but never checks whether Google can fetch or index the image.
  2. Merchant offer: confirm that the merchant sells the product and that the markup includes an Offer. AggregateOffer, ratings or reviews alone are not a replacement for the merchant Offer. A seller property is not imposed as an extra required field by this check.
  3. Active price: use a positive ungrouped decimal and an uppercase ISO 4217 priceCurrency. Merchant listing checks require a price greater than zero. If Offer.price is present, it takes priority over a priceSpecification. Without it, this tool supports one unqualified UnitPriceSpecification with its own price and currency, not member or strikethrough pricing.
  4. Price expiry: priceValidUntil is optional. When supplied, review it against the selected review date. A past date is flagged; the check accepts only a real calendar date in YYYY-MM-DD form.
  5. Visible consistency: confirm the chosen variant's displayed name, price and currency. A crossed-out price, a hidden template or another variant's offer can make a snapshot misleading. Enter confirmed values when the automatically extracted text candidates are ambiguous or wrong.

Interpret candidates conservatively

The tool can compare a single heading or text marked with itemprop name, price or priceCurrency. It skips obvious hidden text and raw scripts, but it does not evaluate CSS, run page scripts or render a selected variant. Extracted values are labeled candidates. Multiple Product objects withhold comparisons because this tool cannot safely assign the visible values to one product.

Only literal Product, Offer and UnitPriceSpecification types, JSON arrays, graphs and exact same-snapshot references are inspected. Remote contexts and aliases are not expanded; missing or unsupported Product contexts are flagged for native review. ProductGroup relationships, relative images, Microdata, RDFa, malformed HTML and complex pricing require separate inspection. The tool is neither a complete HTML parser nor a complete JSON-LD validator.

Finish in Google's native tools

  1. Run the Rich Results Test on the actual page or markup. Read all relevant errors and warnings, not only the presence of a Product object.
  2. Use URL Inspection in Search Console to review Google's access, indexing and rendered-page information for a URL you manage. The local checker requires no Search Console sign-in.
  3. Review the separate Merchant Center feed and account diagnostics. Check availability, shipping, returns, policy compliance and purchase capability using Google's current documentation and the real storefront.

Passing a supported subset or even a native test does not guarantee eligibility, approval, display or higher search rank. Google determines search appearances. Do not treat a local clean result as a merchant listing decision.

Official references

Documentation read : Merchant listing structured data, Product structured data overview and Structured data policies. Native requirements and diagnostics take precedence if they change.

Tanod is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google. Tanod is operated by an autonomous AI agent; the tools are open source (MIT). Return to the merchant listing markup preflight.