Google's Merchant Center help lists the Merchant API among the ways eligible retailers can submit product reviews. The accompanying developer guide describes creating, updating, retrieving and deleting review records. Access requires enrollment in the Product Ratings program and approval for API use. Google does not state the API's original launch date in these pages; the developer guide shows a last-updated date of September 24, 2026.
Access has several prerequisites. The developer guide calls for an active product-review feed in Merchant Center, enrollment in the Product Ratings program and an allowlist request through the Shopping API support form. The separate Merchant Center help page says an applicant needs at least 50 product reviews before applying for the program. A Google representative reviews the application and enables the account. The documentation does not describe API submission as a substitute for those eligibility steps.
The developer examples use review endpoints labeled v1alpha. Creating or updating a review uses an insert operation that receives the review resource and its data-source name. The guide also provides operations for fetching one review, listing reviews and deleting a review, and describes status information attached to review resources. A newly created review may take several minutes to be reflected in the system. These mechanics concern processing the review record, not a promise of immediate public display.
File-based routes remain in the Merchant Center instructions. They include fetching a file from a hosted location, using SFTP or Google Cloud Storage, and uploading a file from a computer. For that workflow, Google requires valid XML and product identifiers that allow reviews to be matched to products, such as GTINs or a brand with a manufacturer part number. Each source file must be smaller than 4 GB, and a complete reviews source must be refreshed at least monthly to maintain eligibility.
Public appearance follows a different timetable from an API operation. Merchant Center's help page says reviews can take two to four weeks to go live after an initial data-source submission. The processing view separately reports the number of updated reviews and detected item issues. Those status checks and processing results describe whether the submitted data has problems; a completed upload alone is not the same event as reviews becoming visible to shoppers.
The guide tells developers to retain each review's data-source name in their local database. They can create a data source or retrieve an existing source's name before inserting reviews. A lookup for an individual review uses the account and review identifiers; deletion uses the resource name returned when the review was created. For uploaded data sources, Merchant Center removes previously submitted reviews that are left out of a new upload.