Google Merchant will take content from your mailings and distribute it on its other channels.

Since April 3, 2025, Google has introduced a new feature in Google Merchant Center that may change the way the marketing campaign content are broadcast.

In this article, we take a look at what we know so far about a feature called "Marketing content usage. We'll be sure to update the article as our knowledge grows.

Official documentation : https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/15760498?hl=en

Who is this feature designed for?

This feature is primarily aimed at companies that use Google Merchant Center to promote their products. It is particularly relevant to all e-commerce sectors. In a nutshell, all companies that regularly send out marketing emails containing information on promotions, new products or events.

Concrete changes

Google can now use the content of your marketing emails - promotions, sales, new products - for display in search results, the Shopping tab, and other channels in its ecosystem. This feature, called "Marketing content usage", has been activated by default since April 3, 2025, but you can deactivate it at any time in your Merchant Center account settings.

What's the link with your email campaigns?

This development is particularly relevant where Gmail holds around 28 % of the mailbox market share in March 2025, according to the Litmus report "March 2025 Email Client Market Share Report"..

This means that a significant proportion of your recipients use Gmail, making your emails potentially accessible to this new feature.

Google can automatically subscribe to your marketing communications, or you can add marketingemailtogoog@gmail.com to your mailing list to facilitate this process.

And what about confidentiality?

It may seem surprising, but Google asserts that this feature complies with its privacy policy. The information extracted from your emails is processed in accordance with the Google Merchant Center terms of use, without any additional conditions.

Why would a company disable this feature?

There are several reasons why a company might decide to disable this feature:

• Brand control To avoid marketing messages being broadcast out of context or without the company's direct control.
• Avoiding mistakes If you're sending promotional offers with a start and end date. You need to be sure that Google captures the end date of the offer.
• Target segmentation or content personalization When a brand runs different promotions depending on the status of its contacts, which promotion will ultimately be displayed in Google's other channels?
• Privacy If certain information contained in the emails is intended for a restricted or exclusive audience.
• Marketing consistency To maintain consistency in message distribution and avoid cannibalization between communication channels.

How can you adapt your emailing practices to take advantage of this?

Google will extract everything it finds in the content of your emails. For example, if your promotions are written in text within an image, it won't make this extraction any easier.

• Structure your emails Use clear tags for your promotions, news and links to social networks, to make it easier for Google to extract the information.
• Be sure to include your offer start and end dates in text format. in your emails to avoid misinterpretation.
• Avoid vague wording which could be misinterpreted by Google. Use subject lines with a clear and precise message. The question is: So how do you effectively write promotional messages that include editorial content?
• Look after your visuals Quality images and relevant videos can improve the presentation of your offers on Google channels. The use of text embedded in images can cause problems for Google's automatic information extraction. It is therefore advisable to limit the amount of text in visuals, and to favor clear, structured text descriptions in the body of the email.
• Fill in your alternative texts on useful images. Don't fill them in on decorative images. If the notion of useful and decorative images isn't clear to you: https://www.badsender.com/2017/04/12/textes-alternatifs-design-emailing/
• Harmonize your messages Make sure the tone and content of your emails are consistent with your overall online presence.

Another step towards digital and marketing excess?

As experts in email marketing and marketing sobriety, we wonder about the consequences of this feature..

While it may seem promising for maximizing the visibility of offers, and therefore the associated revenues, it raises important questions about digital and marketing sobriety.

Automating the delivery of marketing content across multiple channels could contribute to consumer over-solicitation. In a context where digital and marketing sobriety is becoming a major issue, we recommend our audience to keep control. Check your stats over the next few months, and try to measure the impact this feature will have on your revenues and the visibility and consistency of your offers.

Impact on accessibility

It's fair to say that Google Merchant's automated use of email content is encouraging companies to apply a little more good practice to email accessibility:

• Semantic structure : The importance of a clean, semantic HTML structure in emails is reinforced to ensure correct extraction and reuse of information.
• Alternative content The need to provide alternative descriptions for non-decorative images becomes even more crucial.
• Text format, not images A practice we've been shouting about for years!

And that's good news.