Does the Top Quality Store badge help you rank higher in Google Shopping?

What is the Google Top Quality Store badge?

Google introduced the Top Quality Store badge back in 2012, originally called the "Google Trusted Stores" program. The badge is awarded to stores that consistently deliver a great shopping experience: fast shipping, easy returns, and strong customer ratings.

It has only been rolled out to a handful of countries, including the US, UK, and Australia. If your store qualifies, the badge shows up on your Google store page and acts as a trust signal to shoppers browsing products.

Below is an example of Styletread on Google's store pages, an Australian shoe retailer that holds the badge:

Why store quality matters for organic Shopping

SEO is becoming more holistic. Store quality might not feel like traditional SEO work, but the data shows it affects where your products appear in organic Shopping results. In that sense, improving your store's quality score is just as much SEO as keyword research or feed optimization.

The difference in average depth between Top Quality and standard stores is modest, but consistent. There are plenty of nuances in organic Shopping that can blur the signal (multi-seller products being the biggest one), but despite that noise, Top Quality stores rank higher on average.

How to check your store's quality score in Merchant Center

You can check your store quality directly inside Google Merchant Center, under Products & store > Store quality. Google shows you an overall quality score and a shopping experience scorecard comparing your shipping time, shipping cost, return window, and return cost against other stores in your country.

The example below shows what this looks like. Google tells you exactly which metrics to improve and how you compare to similar stores:

Google said themselves in September 2025 that "Businesses using the store widget on their websites saw up to 8% higher sales within 90 days compared to similar businesses without it." Take that with a grain of salt, but our own data supports the directional finding: stores with the Top Quality Store badge rank higher in organic Shopping results.

For context on other factors that influence organic Shopping rankings, see whether product price impacts organic ranking in Google Shopping and whether product reviews lead to higher rankings.

How we calculate this data

Productrise tracks products in organic Shopping, calculating the exact pixel position of each product listing on the SERP. From that position, we derive relative depth. A product at the very top has 0% depth (zero scrolling required), while a product at the very bottom has 100% depth.

We pulled a sample of 30 days of data ending April 23, 2026 where we could reliably identify the store. This includes over 70,000 product listings from more than 300 stores across the US, UK, and Australia. For each listing, we calculate relative depth on the first page of Google and group stores by whether they hold the Top Quality Store badge.

Store quality status is sourced from Google's public store pages (google.com/storepages).