Google tells shops to flag adult products in their feeds. Search results unchanged

Anyone who keeps a product feed has a new line to fill in. Google rewrote its explicit content guidance on 17 September. Shops that sell adult products now have to say so themselves, in the feed or in the page code.

Two ways to do it: the adult attribute or hasAdultConsideration

The first route is the “adult” attribute in Merchant Center, the panel where Google keeps a shop’s product data. The second is the hasAdultConsideration markup on the product page. One of the two is enough. Google did not give a date when it starts to enforce this.

Google says organic listings stay where they are

The guidance carries one sentence that matters for search teams: the label “doesn’t affect your site’s visibility in organic web search results”. So the rule bites in Shopping and in the product features around it. A shop that uses neither will not feel it.

The work moves from Google’s classifiers to the merchant

Until now shops did nothing and Google worked out what counted as adult. The new wording asks the merchant to declare it. That makes this a feed job, not a legal one. It lands on whoever owns the product data, and it lands this month.

Third change to Google product data in a few weeks

Merchants in Europe have had a busy September. Google already dropped free product listings across the EEA to meet the DMA. It also opened AI performance insights in Merchant Center, and it gave retailers a way to share shopper audiences with brands. Each one asks for a change in the same place.

Open Merchant Center today and filter the catalogue for anything that could read as adult. Lingerie, intimate care and novelty lines are the obvious ones. If the adult attribute is empty on those rows, that is the field to fill this week, because Google published no transition period.