#BlinkTank: Google closes the gap between your feed and your schema
Last week we led with Shopify overhauling how it handles collections, the biggest change in how a catalogue gets structured in years. This week, Google has made its own category-level updates to product structured data.
Also in this issue: a Google tracking change that could make your organic traffic look smaller than it is (oh joy), Shopify letting you switch its automatic hreflang tags off, a new Gemini-powered metric in Google Ads, and the EU's €3 import duty now arriving at checkout.
On to the news!
Google closes the gap between your feed and your schema
On 7 July Google updated its merchant listing structured data documentation with two things that until now lived only in Merchant Center feeds. You can declare a product's category in the markup itself, either as plain text or as a code that maps to Google's own taxonomy, and you can set sale timing precisely with validFrom, validThrough and priceValidUntil.
The point is consistency. Price and availability already sit in both your schema and your feed, and when the two disagree Merchant Center can suppress the product in organic shopping. Category is the new part - until now there was no way to state it in your markup at all. This lets both the page and feed match up. As we've said for some time, getting your content, schema and feed to agree is where the efficiency is, so this is very welcome from our perspective.
One other important point - on Shopify populating the new category is usually a developer job, and can depend quite a lot on how your theme is configured. It's worth getting specialist advice if you are in any way unsure what to do.
Meanwhile, none of this is a likely ranking lever, whatever the long-running argument about whether schema matters. Schema is the output layer of your product data, so it is only ever as good as the data underneath.
And as with last week's collections rebuild, the stores that have done the attribute work will get something from this. The rest will not.
🔗 Latest Google Search documentation updates (Google)
Google tests passthrough tracking URLs in search results
Here's something we'll be watching with interest. Over the past few weeks several SEOs, Brodie Clark among them, have spotted Google rewriting some organic result links so they route through a google.com/goto redirect before reaching the destination, with the real URL wrapped in an encoded string. Ahrefs has started picking the pattern up across a rising share of queries.
This looks to be aimed at the scrapers and AI bots that pull clean destination links straight off the results page, forcing them to follow each redirect through Google instead. However, the complication is that a redirect hop sitting between the result and your page can also strip or rewrite the referrer, which is the signal analytics uses to label a visit as organic search.
If that happened across enough queries, organic sessions could start showing up in your reports as direct or none, without any real drop in traffic. Nothing to change today, but if your organic numbers dip while rankings and impressions hold steady, this could be explanation to keep in mind.
🔗 Google testing google.com/goto as tracking URLs in search results (Search Engine Roundtable)
Shopify lets you turn its automatic hreflang tags on or off
Shopify has added a setting, in its 10 July changelog, to turn its automatic hreflang tags on or off from the admin, under Online Store then Preferences. Hreflang tells search engines which language or regional version of a page to serve, and Shopify generates the tags automatically from your Markets settings. That stays on by default.
For most stores, leaving it on is right. It matters for multi-market stores because Shopify's automatic hreflang is rigid: it generates a tag for every language and region pairing it knows about, sensible or not, with no native way to prune the ones you do not want.
On a store with several markets that runs to thousands of tags and a lot of noise, and the only clean fix we have found is to hardcode a controlled set by hand. Until now the automatic and hardcoded tags both fired at once, so this switch is what makes the hand-built approach work. The caveat - if you are not sure something else is generating your hreflang, leave it on, or you will strip the signal off your international pages entirely.
🔗 Turn automatic hreflang tags on or off from your admin settings (Shopify)
Google details its new Qualified Future Conversion metric
Google has explained more about Qualified Future Conversion, a metric it trailed at Google Marketing Live in May. It uses Gemini to estimate the conversions likely to follow within 180 days of someone interacting with a brand or demand-generation campaign, putting a forward value on the top-of-funnel activity that standard attribution windows tend to undervalue.
A Gemini forecast of sales six months out is only as good as the modelling behind it, and it is a restricted pilot for now, with wider beta expected later this year. The part we are most interested in is whether it starts feeding bids, because a predicted-conversion figure driving automated bidding is a different proposition from one you simply read in a report.
🔗 Qualified future conversions (Google)
Shopify starts collecting the EU's €3 import duty at checkout
Since 1 July, Shopify supports the EU's new €3 customs duty per tariff line on qualifying orders up to €150 shipped into the EU from outside it. Where it applies, the fee is calculated, shown and collected at checkout alongside VAT and any national handling fees, either through Managed Markets or Shopify's own import tax and duty calculation. No settings change is needed on your side.
The thing to note for a large, varied catalogue is that the charge is per tariff line, so an order spanning several product categories can carry it more than once. That affects both the landed cost a customer sees and how your pricing reads against competitors already inside the EU. If you do not ship into the EU from outside it, it does not affect you.
🔗 Shopify now supports €3 EU import customs duty collection (Shopify)
Jobs
Something a little different this week. As anyone who has followed us for a while knows, Heur are one of our best and closest partners. I have said it more than once - their team are the best operators I have worked with in ecommerce, and I have been in this space a long time.
We normally keep this section to brand-side roles, but Heur have four open at the moment, and if you are in the market they are about the best people you could work with.
▸ Project Manager - owning delivery across a portfolio of ecommerce and growth accounts, holding scope, timelines and the commercial performance of each.
▸ Retention Lead - leading the retention function across email, SMS, WhatsApp, loyalty, referral and subscription, reporting to the Head of Growth.
▸ Paid Media Executive - a hands-on role building and optimising campaigns across Meta and Google Ads, a good step for someone with a foundation in paid.
▸ Ecommerce Executive - day-to-day trading and optimisation across client Shopify stores, turning trading plans into commercial outcomes.
If you are hiring and the role fits someone with large-catalogue Shopify experience, or you are looking and have that background, send me a message.
Before you go: the gap between adopting AI and getting anything from it
One to end on. Google's new research with Public First, AI that works for Britain, found workplace AI use has doubled to 73% this year, but that the value is concentrated in a small group. The top 15%, whom the report calls AI Trailblazers, save close to eight hours a week and are far more likely to have been promoted or given a pay rise, while most people stay stuck in early experimentation. The barriers it identifies are behavioural and organisational rather than technical.
The reason it caught my eye is that it does not quite match what we hear across our own team, where the sentiment is that AI has not really saved anyone time. What it has changed is what we do with that time. The same hours go further, spent going deeper on a problem rather than clearing it off the desk quicker, so the gain shows up in the depth of the work rather than in hours handed back.
Some of that is how you choose to measure it. If you get twice as much done in eight hours you could call that eight hours saved, but it does not feel like eight hours back in your pocket, it feels like more done, and done better, in the same day. That is the harder version to put in a report, and the harder version to sell, which is probably why Google took this approach instead.
🔗 AI that works for Britain (Google and Public First)
As ever, thanks for reading.
If you found this useful, I would love it if you could share it with someone you think would find it interesting - whether that is someone managing a large-catalogue Shopify store or anyone else who follows this kind of thing.
See you next week.
Sam
Who am I and what does Blink do?
I'm Sam Wright, Managing Director and co-founder of Blink SEO. We're a search marketing agency that works exclusively with large-catalogue Shopify stores - the kind where the challenge isn't just visibility, but helping customers find the right product in the first place.
We specialise in SEO and PPC for merchants managing hundreds or thousands of products. Most of our work starts with taxonomy: how a store is structured and categorised, and what that means for organic performance, paid efficiency, and on-site discovery.
If you found this useful and aren't already subscribed, you can sign up at blinkseo.co.uk/blinktank.
If you run a large-catalogue Shopify store and want to talk about organic or paid performance, reply to this email or find me at blinkseo.co.uk.