Google has introduced what it calls “Marketing content usage”, in a subtle but significant update to its Merchant Center documentation (and yes, they sent out an email about it too).
If you sell physical products and send out sales, promos, or announcements via email, Google may now start crawling those emails, just like it crawls your website. The goal? To surface that content more broadly across Search, Shopping, and even Maps.
That means your marketing content could directly shape how your brand appears on Google, without you submitting a product feed or using structured data.
What’s Google Merchant Center, anyway?
Google Merchant Center is the place where online shops send their product info so Google can show it across Search, Shopping, Maps, and other surfaces. If you’ve ever seen a product with a price and image right in the search results: that’s Merchant Center at work.
It’s mainly for ecommerce businesses, but even small stores can use it to boost visibility, with or without running ads.
So what’s actually happening?
Here’s the breakdown:
- Google may automatically sign up for your marketing emails.
- You can also manually send content by adding
marketingemailtogoog@gmail.comto your email list. - Google will crawl those emails and extract:
- Sales & promotions
- New product arrivals
- Social media content & links
- Brand voice, values, images, and videos
This content may be displayed on:
- Google Search
- The Shopping tab
- Google Maps
📌 Quick note: When Google says “marketing content,” they mean your email newsletters, promo announcements, and campaign blasts, not your blog or social media posts directly (though those might be linked and pulled in too).
Why it matters (especially for SEO and brand marketing)
Email is now a crawling surface
Google is officially treating email content as something it can parse for brand and product info. If you’ve ever wondered whether email marketing affects search visibility: this is your answer. Google is blurring the lines
Structured data, product feeds, email campaigns: it’s all part of the same ecosystem now. Your tone, timing, and visuals could influence how your brand is presented in Google’s results.
Less control, but not no control
You can opt out at any time from within Merchant Center. But if you stay opted in, Google will treat your email content as fair game under its Merchant Center terms.
What should you do?
1. Decide if you want in
If you’re not comfortable with this kind of automatic parsing, opt out in Merchant Center:
→ Go to General account options
→ Marketing content usage
→ Do not share data
→ Save.
2. Make your emails more crawlable
If you stay opted in, optimize those emails! You should:
- Use full URLs to link to promotions and social profiles.
- Keep product names and offers clear and literal.
- Add
altattributes to images where possible. - Avoid burying important information in images only.
3. Monitor how your brand appears
Every so often, Google your brand name or products and check what’s being surfaced, especially in the Shopping tab and local panels.
The bigger picture
This is part of a larger trend: Google wants to understand your brand from every possible source, not just your site or feed. Your website, your emails, your social presence, it’s all fair game.
And now, with a Gmail address quietly subscribed to your mailing list, it’s official: Google is your newest subscriber.
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