Google Search Console now shows Merchant Listing Performance in Image Search

Google today announced an update to Search Console, its platform for website owners and webmasters. This update enhances functionalities for online merchants by enabling them to view merchant listing performance within the Google Search Image tab.

Previously, Search Console offered a dedicated "Shopping" section within its navigation bar for websites identified by Google as online merchants. This section provided tools and reports related to shopping experiences on Google for those websites. Eligibility for this section is determined by Google's algorithms and typically applies to websites selling physical goods or those utilizing product structured data.

Within the Shopping section of Search Console, online merchants might encounter one or more of the following reports depending on the structured data Google finds on their website:

• Product Snippet Rich Report: This report showcases performance data for product snippet structured data implemented on a website. Product snippets can appear in search results with visual enhancements such as product ratings and prices. This report is available if Google identifies product snippet structured data on the website.
• Merchant Listing Rich Report: This report focuses on the performance of merchant listing structured data. Merchant listings are essentially an extension of product snippets, offering more comprehensive search results that always include a price. They might appear in carousels featuring similar products from various sellers or within knowledge panels displayed in search results.
• Shopping Tab Listings: This section provides information about a website's product listings within the Shopping tab of Google Search. It can also offer guidance on enabling product visibility within the Shopping tab. This section might be displayed even if a website doesn't have either the Product Snippet Rich Report or the Merchant Listing Rich Report. In such cases, Google might have identified structured data on the website, but the sample data used by Search Console for report generation might lack the necessary entity data. Despite this, Google can still include the website's products within the Shopping tab.

The inclusion of merchant listing performance within the Google Search Image tab provides online merchants with valuable insights into how their products are performing in image search results. By analyzing this data, merchants can potentially optimize their product listings and images to improve visibility and click-through rates within image search.