Google Merchant Center Now Accepts Up to 30 Product Q&As per Item for AI Mode

Retailers can now send Google up to 30 questions and answers for every product in their Merchant Center feed. The new question_and_answer attribute is optional, can be used in all countries and, in Google’s words, is “primarily intended for use in conversational experiences such as AI mode in Google Search.”

It’s one of six conversational attributes Google lists in the Merchant Center product data specification. Search Engine Land reported the Q&A attribute on October 27, 2026.

Google hasn’t published performance data for this attribute on its own. But the answers you write for the feed are the same answers shoppers look for on your product pages, and that’s where the conversion upside is.

What Google Changed

The attribute is a group with two required sub-attributes, question and answer, each up to 1,000 characters. You can repeat it up to 30 times per product, and all Q&As on one product can’t exceed 10,000 characters in total (Google Merchant Center Help).

Google says the answers can be user-, merchant- or manufacturer-authored, and suggests covering specifications, ingredients, package contents and what the product is meant for.

The other five conversational attributes are document_link, related_product, item_group_title, variant_option and popularity_rank. Google says including them “won’t impact the approval status of your existing products” and recommends a supplemental data source (How to use conversational attributes).

The Rules Google Set

• Content: only information about the product.
• Prices and dates: not allowed. Google says time-related details belong in the offer attributes.
• Keywords: avoid listing keywords or search terms.
• Duplication: don’t repeat what’s already in title, description, product_detail or product_highlight.
• PDF manuals: if the same answers are in a document_link PDF, skip the Q&A; Google extracts FAQ information from the document.
• File format: Google recommends TSV over CSV, because commas inside answers complicate parsing.

Why It Matters for Holiday Shoppers

In its September 16 holiday update, Google said that during testing with lululemon, conversational attributes submitted by the brand “were incorporated 50% of the time in relevant product recommendations in AI Mode” (Google). That figure covers conversational attributes as a group, not Q&A alone, and comes from one brand’s test.

The same post says merchants adopting core Merchant Center feed best practices see, on average, a 5% increase in conversions the following month. Google also made AI performance insights in Merchant Center available in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the U.S., so merchants can compare their share of voice on surfaces like AI Mode and AI Overviews.

What to Test Next

• Pick your 10 best-selling products and list the top 5 pre-purchase questions for each, from support tickets, chat logs, return reasons and reviews.
• Check those product pages: are the answers visible near the add-to-cart button, without opening a chat or a PDF?
• Write answers under 1,000 characters, with no prices, dates or keyword lists, and reuse the same wording in the feed.
• Add them through a supplemental data source for a test group of products, and confirm Google processes them before you scale.
• Compare that group’s product page conversion rate with similar products that don’t have a visible FAQ.

Not sure your product pages answer the questions AI Mode is asking? Get a free audit and we’ll show you which objections are costing you sales.