What "Click potential" actually means, and how it can drive your feed optimizations

You put effort into your product feed. You have titles, descriptions, images, and prices. Your products are in Google Merchant Center, approved, and theoretically eligible for organic Shopping carousels. And yet some products barely get any impressions while others perform much better, and you have no clear idea why.

The frustrating part is that Google has data about which of your products could be performing better. It's called click potential, and it lives right inside your Merchant Center account. Most e-commerce SEOs either don't know it exists or don't know how to act on it.

This article explains what click potential actually is, what likely drives it, and how to use it as a starting point for the feed optimization work that actually moves the needle on organic visibility.

What click potential actually is

Click potential is a field in Google's Merchant API that estimates how much more organic traffic a product could be getting. Google defines it as: "A product's click potential estimates the performance potential compared to your highest performing products."

It appears in two forms: a label (LOW, MEDIUM, or HIGH) and a numerical rank between 1 and 1,000, where 1 represents the highest potential in your catalog.

That definition is worth paying attention to. Click potential is not a comparison against the entire market or your competitors. It is an internal benchmark against your own catalog's best performers.

Here's a look at how Google categorizes click potential scores across these three tiers.

What goes into the click potential calculation

Google has not published the exact formula for click potential. The documentation does describe what it is based on: past traffic metrics, the product data you have provided, and demand signals for similar products.

Reading between the lines, the calculation likely considers a combination of: how many organic clicks and impressions the product currently gets, how complete and well-structured the product data in the feed is, and how much demand Google observes for similar products in the market.

Products with LOW click potential tend to fall into two categories. The first is products that are unoptimized and have high volume potential, meaning Google sees demand for them but the feed data is not good enough to show them consistently. These are the most actionable products in your catalog. The second is products that are reasonably well-optimized but simply operate in a low-demand category or niche. Better feed data might help at the margin, but the ceiling for these products is lower by nature.

Knowing which category a product falls into matters, because the right response to each is different.

Rule of thumb: low click potential products are often missing product data

When looking at product feeds, a pattern shows up consistently: products with LOW click potential tend to have less product information than those with MEDIUM or HIGH scores.

Here is an example of a product in GMC with a LOW click potential score. Note the limited product attributes.

And here is a product with a MEDIUM click potential score that has received a similar number of clicks but has noticeably richer product data.

This is not a coincidence. Google uses your product data to understand what a product is, who it is for, and which searches it is relevant to. When that data is thin — a short title, no GTIN, missing color or material, a description that says very little — Google has fewer signals to work with. A product with a rich, complete data set gives Google more to match against real searches.

The rule of thumb: if a product has LOW click potential and incomplete product data, the two things are likely connected. Filling in the gaps — adding the missing attributes, writing a more descriptive title, completing the description — gives Google the information it needs to start surfacing it more often.

This does not mean click potential is purely a data quality score. Demand, competition, and current performance all play a role. But when you are looking at a list of products with LOW click potential and trying to decide where to start, the ones with obvious data gaps are typically the best place to begin.

Product data hygiene: your feed is an SEO asset

Click potential gives you a rough indication of where to focus, but it should not be the only thing driving your feed optimization decisions.

Your product feed is not just an operational necessity. It is the primary input Google uses to decide which products appear in organic carousels, on which queries, and how prominently. Think of it the way you think about on-page SEO: a page with a missing title tag, no meta description, and thin content is going to struggle regardless of how good the underlying product is. The same logic applies to a product with an underdeveloped feed entry.

That means optimizing the entire product range matters, not just the products Google has already flagged. A product with MEDIUM click potential and incomplete data still has room to improve. A product with LOW click potential might simply be in a competitive category where demand is lower, but that does not mean better data would not help.

A proper product feed audit covers both the basics — title length, description completeness, GTIN presence, image quality, Google product category — and the more nuanced checks like whether your feed data matches the structured data on your product pages. Price mismatches between the feed and website are a common issue that can get flagged as a critical error. Duplicate titles across product variants are another one that quietly hurts visibility without being immediately obvious.

This overview of 18 feed audit checks is a good place to start if you want to understand what a thorough audit actually covers.

The goal is to get to a state where every product in your catalog has complete, accurate, and well-structured data. Click potential then becomes a useful signal for prioritization within that larger effort, but the effort itself should cover the full catalog.

Supplemental feeds are a SEO's best friend

Even if you know exactly what to fix in your product feed, actually fixing it can be complicated. In most e-commerce businesses, the primary product feed is shared between the SEO team and the paid Shopping team. The paid team has optimized titles for conversion rates, not search relevance. They have excluded low-margin products because ad spend needs to generate returns. If you start changing titles or adding attributes to improve organic visibility, you risk disrupting paid campaign performance.

Supplemental feeds are a practical solution to this problem. A supplemental feed sits on top of your primary feed and overrides specific attributes for the products you choose. The primary feed stays exactly as the paid team needs it. The supplemental feed adds or updates attributes specifically for organic visibility without touching anything in the primary feed.

You can use a supplemental feed to write longer, keyword-rich titles that include the terms people actually search for. You can write more comprehensive descriptions that help Google understand what each product is and who it is for. You can add missing attributes like color, size, material, or GTIN that your primary feed may not include.

Productrise makes creating a supplemental feed straightforward. Our AI model analyzes your existing product data and product pages, identifies what is missing or underdeveloped, and generates optimized titles, descriptions, and attributes that you can push as a supplemental feed directly from the platform, without touching your primary feed or needing access to your feed management tools or PIM system. You can get started for free, no credit card required.

If you want to go deeper on how supplemental feeds work and how other SEOs have used them, this article covers the full picture, including what you can and cannot modify and when a supplemental feed makes the most sense.

The broader point is this: click potential tells you which products have room to improve. Feed audits tell you what specifically needs fixing. Supplemental feeds give you the mechanism to make those fixes without waiting for access to the primary feed or navigating internal approval processes. All three together give you a practical workflow for improving organic product visibility at scale.