Fix “Missing value [brand]” on Google Merchant Center

Brand requirements vary by category in Google's policy doc but apply almost universally in practice. Apparel, electronics, beauty, home goods — almost everything requires brand. The categories where it's optional (truly custom-made items, vintage, antiques) are narrow enough that "always populate brand" is the safer default. Items without brand serve in Shopping but with materially reduced visibility — the algorithm treats brandless listings as lower-confidence and demotes them in the auction.

The own-brand handling is the most-asked question. Your store name is a valid brand even when you're the manufacturer. "Acme Goods" is a brand; "Generic" is not (it's accepted but suppresses delivery quality by roughly 20-30% in operational testing). "Unbranded" is similarly low-value. Use your store name for own-brand products; you're the brand owner in that scenario, and the brand string carries the trust and recognition signal that helps the listing rank.

The marketplace-reseller case is where teams sometimes go wrong. If you're selling Sony headphones through your store, the brand is Sony — even if your store name is "AudioWorld". Putting the store name on resold products gets flagged eventually as brand misrepresentation, and the account-level quality consequences are worse than the temporary listing visibility loss. Brand misrepresentation can trigger account-level reviews; brand correctness with low visibility just suppresses individual listings.

For multi-brand consistency, the rule is one canonical brand string per brand across the catalog. "Nike" and "NIKE" and "nike" and "Nike Inc." are four different brands to Google's classifier. A catalog with three variants has three "Nike" brands fragmented across reporting and rules — brand-level performance reports show separate Nike entries; brand-specific bidding rules apply to only one of the three; the algorithm treats them as different brands. Pick the manufacturer's official spelling (typically Title Case, the way it appears on their site) and enforce it programmatically in the feed-generation step. Don't trust SKU-by-SKU consistency; enforce it at the layer that writes the feed.

The character-limit consideration: Google's max brand length is 70 characters. Real brand names rarely come close to this, but compound brands and parent-company prefixes ("Acme Sports & Outdoor by Acme Goods") can hit the limit. Stick to the manufacturer's primary brand name; parent-company prefixes belong elsewhere if they add value.

The category-specific consideration: some categories accept brand more loosely than others. Apparel and electronics require accurate brand strictly; commodity categories (basic groceries, generic office supplies) are more forgiving. For commodity items where there isn't a real "brand", your store name remains correct — don't invent fake brands to fill the field.

AI Shopping Feeds' Optimiser auto-fills brand from product description and image analysis where the source data is missing the field but the brand is otherwise inferrable. The Audit feature normalises brand strings across the catalog (catching the "Nike vs NIKE" fragmentation) and flags items where the feed's declared brand doesn't match the landing page's visible brand (a common cause of Mismatched brand flags downstream).