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.

Worth noting a nuance Google's popularity_rank documentation makes explicit: the attribute is "primarily intended for use in conversational experiences such as AI Mode in Google Search" — not specifically the Shopping ads badge. That's a further reason to treat the badge and the attribute as related but not confirmed to be the same mechanism; Google may be pulling the "X sold last week" figure from a different internal sales signal entirely, with popularity_rank feeding a separate AI Mode-facing surface. Merchants are told to submit it as a plain number between 0 and 100, to one decimal place, with no percentage sign, and to update it "when there is a substantial change in its popularity based on your recent sales" — a maintenance cadence Google leaves to the merchant's judgement rather than specifying a fixed refresh window.

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