Local Inventory Ads Default On for Shopping Campaigns

Until now, serving in-store stock through a Shopping campaign was an opt-in choice. An advertiser (or the developer managing the account) had to deliberately enable the "Local products" setting for local inventory to appear. From 31 August 2026 that switch flips the other way: local products serve by default, and any campaign with a local feed will start showing in-store availability unless the advertiser actively filters it out.

The change is narrow in who it touches but worth understanding well in advance. It only affects advertisers who already have a local product feed connected in Google Merchant Center. If you have never set up local inventory, there is nothing to serve and nothing changes. For omnichannel retailers with physical stores, though, the default flip alters what runs in your Shopping campaigns and how your budget is spent.

How the change works

Local Inventory Ads let a retailer advertise products that are physically in stock in nearby shops. They pull from a local product feed in Merchant Center, which lists per-store availability and pricing, and they surface store details such as opening hours and distance. Historically a Shopping campaign served online products only, and local inventory was layered on as an explicit setting.

From 31 August 2026, Google will treat the "Local products" setting as switched on for every standard Shopping campaign. Behind the scenes this is the same mechanism Performance Max for Retail already uses, so the update is about consistency across campaign types rather than a brand new ad format. If a campaign is tied to a Merchant Center account that carries a local feed, its local offers become eligible to serve automatically.

Existing campaigns need no manual migration to receive the new behaviour. Any previously configured preference to keep local products off will stop taking effect once the default lands, which is precisely why an audit ahead of the date matters: a setting you deliberately chose in the past will quietly be overridden unless you replace it with the newer inventory filter approach.

Advertisers who want to keep a campaign online-only will still be able to do so, but the control moves from a single on or off toggle to an inventory filter. In practice that means adding a listing scope that limits the campaign to online products, or using the Inventory filter section in campaign settings to separate online and local stock and keep their budgets siloed. Nothing about this requires code: the same outcome is available directly in the Google Ads interface under the campaign's settings.

Where this shows up in practice

Consider a UK homeware retailer with a dozen high-street stores and a Merchant Center account that already includes a local feed for click-and-collect. Today they might run one Shopping campaign for online sales and treat local as a separate, deliberately enabled effort. From 31 August, unless they intervene, that online Shopping campaign begins serving local availability too, putting in-store stock in front of nearby shoppers and potentially driving footfall the campaign was never briefed to chase.

For a retailer that wants exactly that outcome, the default is a quiet win. Omnichannel reach expands with no manual setup, and shoppers searching on mobile near a store can see that an item is in stock down the road. Store visits, click-and-collect, and "available today" intent are all served without the advertiser lifting a finger.

A second case is the retailer with patchy local coverage: strong stock in a handful of city stores but thin availability elsewhere. For them the default is not harmful, but it is uneven, and a shopper in a town with no nearby branch simply sees the standard online offer. Reviewing where local inventory is genuinely deep helps decide whether to lean into the default or filter it back to the regions where in-store availability is a real selling point.

The flip side is the retailer that runs online and local as separate strategies on purpose, with distinct budgets and performance targets. For them, a campaign that silently starts mixing channels muddies attribution and can pull spend toward local impressions that were meant to sit in a different line item. That is the scenario to catch before the deadline, not after.

What this means for UK advertisers and agencies

If you manage Shopping campaigns for retailers with physical stores, the practical task is a short audit before 31 August 2026. Check which accounts have a local product feed in Merchant Center, then decide, campaign by campaign, whether local products should serve. For most omnichannel brands the answer will be yes, and the default simply saves a configuration step. For accounts that deliberately silo channels, you will want to add the online-only inventory filter before the switch lands so nothing changes without your say-so. If you would rather not run that audit yourself, our Google Ads management team handles exactly this kind of pre-deadline account review.

The bigger point for agencies is budget clarity. A single campaign that serves both online and local blurs the line between two very different goals: shipping a product nationwide versus getting someone into a shop this afternoon. If channel-level reporting matters to a client, siloing budgets by channel keeps the numbers clean and the story you tell in a monthly review honest. This is the kind of account-hygiene decision that belongs in a considered paid media strategy rather than left to a platform default.

It is also a reminder that retail search is steadily consolidating around inventory-aware, cross-channel formats. Performance Max for Retail already assumes local and online sit together, and this change nudges standard Shopping in the same direction. Retailers who treat their local feed as a first-class asset, keeping store stock and pricing accurate in Merchant Center, will get more from the shift than those who leave it as an afterthought. Google's own documentation on local inventory ads sets out the feed requirements in detail.

Practical considerations before 31 August

First, the change only bites where a local feed exists. If an account has no local inventory set up in Merchant Center, the default has nothing to act on and the campaigns carry on exactly as before. Do not spend time re-engineering accounts that were never local in the first place.

Second, if you rely on separating online and local today, plan the inventory filter now rather than on the day. Adding a listing scope for online products, or setting the Inventory filter in campaign settings, takes minutes but needs to be in place before 31 August to prevent an unintended channel mix. Document which campaigns you have filtered so the intent is clear to whoever reviews the account next.

Third, watch your reporting in the weeks after the switch. Even where you want local to serve, a shift in the online-to-local mix can move cost per click, conversion rate, and cost per acquisition, because store-visit intent behaves differently from online purchase intent. Give the data a fortnight to settle, then judge performance on the outcome that matters to the client rather than on a single headline metric that moved for structural reasons.

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