Google Shopping product titles and descriptions: the rules that cause problems
Google’s product data specification limits a title to 150 characters and a description to 5,000. The Feed Validator also warns about titles in capital letters, promotional text such as “free shipping” and HTML in the description. In the example feed of 5 products, 4 have at least one such finding.
Upload your feed – the validator shows titles and descriptions that need work and fixes capitalisation and HTML.
Open the Feed ValidatorLength limits
These limits are from Google’s product data specification (retrieved 2026-10-19). A field over the limit is reported as an error by the Feed Validator.
| Attribute | Maximum length |
|---|---|
| title | 150 |
| description | 5,000 |
| brand | 70 |
| id | 50 |
What the Feed Validator warns about
These checks are the validator’s own rules and are shown as warnings, not as certain rejections. Google’s policies can change, so read the specification before you decide what to change.
- Title in capital letters: a title with at least two words and eight letters and no lowercase letter.
- Promotional text in the title: phrases such as “free shipping”, “sale”, “buy now”, a percentage off, or several exclamation marks.
- Promotional text in the description: the clearest cases such as “free shipping”, “buy now” or a percentage off.
- HTML in the description: tags such as <p> or <b>. Use plain text.
What to use instead of promotional text
Put the offer where the feed has a place for it: use sale_price for a reduced price and the shipping attributes for shipping costs. The title then only says what the product is: brand, product type and the features that tell variants apart, such as color and size.
Fix it in one go
The Feed Validator can correct capital-letter titles to normal capitalisation and remove HTML tags from descriptions. It does not rewrite promotional text, because deleting words from a title needs your judgement.
Worked examples: 5 example products through the Feed Validator
Made-up products: a mug in capital letters with “free shipping”, a lamp with HTML, a t-shirt with a very long title, a shirt with promotional text in the description and one clean product. Example data, not a real shop.
- Titles in capital letters
- 1
- Promotional text in the title / in the description
- 1 / 1
- HTML in the description
- 1
- Title longer than 150 characters
- 1
- Fixed automatically (capitalisation / HTML)
- 1 / 1
Most findings are quick to fix. Run the file through the validator before you upload it, and fix the promotional text yourself.