Google adding ‘Promotions’ & support numbers, emails to retailer Knowledge Panels

Ahead of the busy holiday shopping season, Google today announced a number of product updates, like updating Knowledge Panels for retailers with a “Promotions” section.

A retailer’s Knowledge Panel today might show the “location of a business’ headquarters or the number of employees” in addition to the Wikipedia description and links to social media accounts.

Knowledge Panels will soon show “helpful shopping information” that most notably adds a “Promotions” section of current deals like discounts and promo codes with prominent buttons. You can tap “More promotions” at the bottom. 

The Knowledge Panel will also surface “shipping and return policies, customer service information and ratings and reviews,” which is much more useful than corporate info. This might also include a link to the online support help page, as well as a customer service phone number and email, to save you from performing an additional search.

This is starting to roll out this month in select countries for “certain retailer searches,” while Google also plans to show the Knowledge Panel for more merchants: “We’ll showcase information you’re already sharing on Merchant Center, as well as other authoritative information from across the web.”

Meanwhile, merchants can now showcase a “Small business” label/attribute on product cards in Search and Maps. Go to the Merchant Center or Business Profile in the US to set this up.

We’ll automatically add the small business attribute to some merchants’ listings based on factors like how many products they offer, the number of locations they have or how much web traffic they get. You can remove it in Merchant Center or through your Business Profile at any time.

Lastly, Merchant Center Next users will soon get the AI-powered Product Studio that includes experimental AI-powered scene generation that lets you place product shots against custom backgrounds. This is rolling out starting today.

Product Studio will share a few prompt ideas, including holiday-themed scenes, to spark inspiration. It’s easy to tweak or reuse prompts that worked well for you in the past. You can also remove distracting backgrounds or improve resolution on your product images in one click.