Local and merchant data in AI answers

When an AI answer recommends a nearby dentist or compares two running shoes, the facts it shows, opening hours, addresses, prices, stock status, do not come only from crawled web pages. Google's AI features guide names two structured inputs for this information: it recommends using products like Merchant Center, including Merchant Center feeds, and Google Business Profiles to help your products and services be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results. For local businesses and shops, these two data sources are as much a part of AEO as anything published on the website.

Business Profile: the local data layer

A Google Business Profile is the structured record Google holds about a physical business: name, address, phone number, opening hours, categories, services, attributes, photos and reviews. When an AI experience answers a local question, this profile is the authoritative source for those facts. That has two practical consequences:

• Accuracy is not optional. If the profile says you open at nine and you open at ten, the answer engine repeats the error with your name attached. Hours, holiday hours, address and phone need to be maintained like production data, not set once and forgotten.
• Completeness is matching power. Categories, services and attributes describe what you do in structured terms an engine can match against a question like "who repairs heat pumps near me". Empty fields are questions you have chosen not to answer.

Merchant Center: the product data layer

For ecommerce, the equivalent input is a Merchant Center feed: a structured list of your products following Google's product data specification, with an identifier, title, description, link, image, price and availability for each item. The feed powers free listings as well as ads, and per Google's AI guide it helps products appear in AI responses. The same maintenance logic applies. Price and availability change constantly, and a stale feed either shows a wrong price in an answer or drops the product from consideration. Feeds should update as often as the catalog does. Google's guide also points qualifying merchants to Business Agent, a conversational experience on Search that lets customers chat with a brand directly.

Beyond blog content

Most advice about AI visibility is really advice about articles: write clear answers, keep pages snippet eligible, earn citations. That advice holds, but for local businesses and shops it is only half the picture. The other half is a data layer that never appears on a blog:

1. Keep the profile and feed correct first. A wrong price or wrong opening time does more damage in an AI answer than a missing article ever will, because it reaches a customer who is ready to act.
2. Keep the website consistent with both. Prices, availability and hours on your pages should match the feed and the profile. Consistent signals are easier to trust, and product markup on the site, covered in structured data, reinforces the same facts.
3. Then let content do the reasoning work. Comparisons, guides and honest product detail give engines something to quote when the question is "which one should I buy", not just "what does it cost".

Vupie can keep that editorial side running on autopilot, but the profile and the feed are inputs only you can maintain. Treat them as the operational half of AEO: less visible than publishing, and at least as decisive when an engine assembles an answer about your business.