GOOGLE ADS BRAND INCLUSION IN SHOPPING CAMPAIGNS

For about a day in November 2025, a lot of retail advertisers thought they'd finally been handed a control they'd wanted for years. The story doing the rounds was that google ads brand inclusion shopping campaigns were now a real thing, with a native brand list panel showing up inside Standard Shopping ad groups. Then Google said no, it wasn't a rollout, and the option quietly disappeared.

I want to unpick that episode properly, because the way it played out is more useful than the rumour itself. This is a practitioner's read on what surfaced, what Google actually confirmed, and what the whole thing tells you about where Shopping is heading. It's one of the more instructive pieces of google shopping ads news 2025, precisely because the feature didn't ship.

The short version: brand inclusions remain a Search feature, Shopping still doesn't get a native inclusions toggle, and the workarounds you were using before are still the workarounds you use now. But the demand the episode exposed, and the inference you can draw about Google's direction, are worth more than five minutes of excitement over a screenshot.

What actually happened in November 2025

Here's the sequence, because the timing matters. In mid-November 2025 a practitioner spotted a brand inclusions setting appearing at the ad group level of a Standard Shopping campaign, posted about it, and the industry press picked it up within hours. The framing was celebratory: no more search-query scripts to keep non-brand searches out of a brand Shopping campaign, native control at last.

Then, almost as quickly, came the correction. A Google spokesperson clarified that this wasn't a feature they had rolled out, and that brand inclusions aren't currently supported in Standard Shopping or Performance Max campaigns, only brand exclusions are available in Performance Max. What people had seen was, in effect, a control leaking into the interface before it was real, and it was pulled.

So the honest headline isn't "Shopping got brand inclusions." It's "an unreleased control briefly appeared, and Google confirmed the supported toolset hadn't changed." That distinction is the whole point of this article, and it's why I file this under a lesson in reading updates rather than a feature launch. The underlying mechanics of brand settings are documented by Google in its overview of brand settings for Search and Performance Max, which spells out exactly where inclusions and exclusions apply, and which is the page I'd check before assuming anything about my own account.

Inclusion versus exclusion, and why the difference matters

Half the confusion in the news cycle came from people using two opposite terms as if they were the same. They aren't, and only one of them exists for Shopping inventory today.

Brand inclusion restricts a campaign so it serves only for queries associated with brands you list. Per Google's own documentation, that's a Search-campaign control, not a Shopping one. Brand exclusion does the reverse, stopping a campaign from serving on queries tied to brands you name, and for Performance Max it applies to Search and Shopping inventory. So a PMax campaign can already be told which brands to stay away from, it just can't be told which brands to serve exclusively.

That asymmetry is the real substance behind the November 2025 story. Advertisers wanted the inclusion side of that pair for Shopping, the ability to say "this Standard Shopping campaign should only chase branded demand," without hacking it together from priority and negatives. The leaked panel looked like exactly that, which is why it travelled so fast. The inference I draw is that Google knows the gap exists, has clearly been building toward closing it in the interface, and simply wasn't ready to commit. If you want the deeper mechanics of how Shopping matches queries to products underneath all this, it sits on top of how Google Shopping actually works, which is the foundation none of these controls change.

How I control brand traffic in Shopping today

Because the native toggle isn't real, I do what I did before the rumour, and it works. The goal is the same one the leaked feature promised: make sure branded searches go to a campaign I've built for them, and keep them out of the generic campaign that should be chasing non-brand demand.

Split brand and non-brand with priority and negatives

In Standard Shopping I run separate brand and non-brand campaigns and lean on campaign priority plus shared negative keyword lists. The generic campaign gets the brand terms added as negatives, so when someone searches my brand, that campaign is blocked and the dedicated brand campaign serves instead. This is the same negative-keyword discipline I apply across Shopping, and it's worth reading how I structure negative keywords for Shopping campaigns specifically, because in this setup they're the steering mechanism, not just a way to block waste.

Use brand exclusions where PMax is live

If Performance Max is running alongside, I use the one native control that does exist and exclude the brands I want a dedicated campaign to own, so PMax stops absorbing branded queries it would otherwise skim cheaply. That keeps the boundaries honest between automated reach and the campaigns I'm steering by hand.

Mirror the split in the feed

None of this works if the catalogue underneath is a mess, so I make the campaign segmentation mirror the feed segmentation, the way I build a product feed strategy around best-sellers. Hero and branded lines get their own room rather than being averaged in with everything else, which makes the brand-versus-generic split actually meaningful rather than cosmetic. It's more manual than a single inclusions checkbox would be, but it's auditable, it's stable, and it doesn't depend on a feature that hasn't shipped.

What the episode signals about Shopping's direction

I don't rebuild account structure around a feature Google explicitly said isn't supported. But I do read leaks like this as directional signal, and here the signal is fairly clear.

A control doesn't appear in the interface, even briefly, unless someone has been building it. The fact that inclusions surfaced at the ad group level of Standard Shopping tells me the plumbing exists and the intent is there, Google just pulled it before it was ready or before it decided how it fits alongside the broader push toward AI-driven campaign types. Brand inclusions have already been migrating into AI Max for Search since May 2025, so the whole brand-settings surface is in motion, and it's reasonable to expect Shopping to eventually get a cleaner brand control than scripts and negatives.

The practical inference for right now: keep your workarounds clean. If you're still separating brand and non-brand Shopping traffic with priority, negatives and the occasional script, that's precisely the machinery a native inclusions feature would replace, so make sure it's current and well-maintained. If inclusions do ship for Shopping, you'll adopt them in an afternoon. Until then you lose nothing by relying on the supported tools, and this is the sort of update where the smart move is to stay ready, not to chase the headline. It slots neatly alongside the broader shift I cover in Standard Shopping versus Performance Max, where the same tension between manual control and automation keeps playing out.

The takeaway

If I compress the whole google ads brand inclusion shopping campaigns story into one line, it's this: the feature didn't ship, the demand is real, and the workarounds still work. Don't act on a screenshot, act on what Google confirms in its documentation.

The concrete move is unglamorous but right. Keep brand and non-brand Standard Shopping campaigns properly split with priority and negatives, keep Performance Max brand exclusions in place, keep the feed segmentation mirroring the campaign segmentation, and check the official brand-settings page rather than the news cycle before you assume a control exists in your account. That's how you get the outcome the leaked panel promised, without betting on a feature that vanished the day after it appeared. When native inclusions do arrive for Shopping, and I think they eventually will, you'll be structured to switch to them cleanly, and that readiness is worth more than the excitement was.