Google Shopping Ads Are Leaning Harder Into "Sold Last Week" Badges

Google is showing an extension on some Shopping ads that displays a specific sales count — "200+ sold last week," or whatever the real number is — directly on the ad unit.

What was spotted

Paid media practitioner Arpan Banerjee posted a screenshot on LinkedIn, noting that Google is "flexing 'sold last week' badges harder in Shopping ads lately" — suggesting the extension isn't new, but its visibility and prominence has increased.

Where this fits in Merchant Center

Google's own documentation on annotations and badges in Shopping ads and free listings confirms that Google "dynamically decides which annotations and badges to display, based on their relevance to customers and to improve Shopping ads and free listings performance for merchants" — and explicitly states that supplying the underlying data doesn't guarantee a badge will actually show. Merchants can also submit a popularity_rank attribute, a 0–100 score meant to communicate how well a product is selling relative to the rest of the catalogue. Google's documentation doesn't name a specific "X sold last week" badge tied to that attribute, so it isn't confirmed whether this is the same mechanism surfacing more often, a related signal, or a distinct annotation — only that the badge itself has become more visible in practice.

Why it matters

Social proof badges like this influence click-through by signalling popularity before a shopper even opens the listing. Because Google controls display eligibility algorithmically rather than guaranteeing a badge for any merchant who submits the right data, an increase in how often this badge appears likely reflects a change in Google's own display logic, not something merchants can directly trigger. For merchants, that means products with genuinely strong recent sales get an extra visibility boost baked into the ad, which could widen the gap between already-popular products and the rest of a catalogue.

What to check

• Keep Merchant Center inventory, price and availability data current — badges tied to real-time performance are more likely to reflect (and reward) accurate feed data
• If you submit popularity_rank, make sure it's genuinely representative of current sales, not a stale or manually estimated figure
• Watch for the badge appearing on low-stock items — a "sold last week" claim next to an item that's about to go out of stock could create a poor experience if a shopper clicks through to find it unavailable

Sources

• Arpan Banerjee on LinkedIn — original screenshot and spot
• Google Merchant Center: About annotations and badges
• Google Merchant Center: Popularity rank attribute