Google says conversational attributes are optional. History says otherwise.

Every time Google introduces something as optional, it eventually becomes infrastructure for a business that generates roughly $300 billion a year in advertising revenue.

Mobile-friendly was optional. Page speed was optional. Structured data was optional.

Each one stopped being a choice.

At Google Marketing Live last month, Google launched conversational attributes, a new set of product-feed fields built for AI shopping. They're optional too, for now.

Look at how this one arrives. The fields won't affect whether your existing products stay approved. You can add them through a supplemental file without touching your main feed. And if the information already lives in your descriptions, Google tells you not to bother duplicating it. Every reason a busy team might say no has been removed in advance.

Platforms don't sand down the friction like that for things they're indifferent about. They do it when they need the data more than you currently need to give it.

And Google does need it.

Its AI shopping answers fall apart on thin listings. When someone asks a long, specific question in full sentences, the system has to pull real detail from somewhere, and most feeds can't supply it today. So Google built the easiest possible on-ramp and made the ask sound like a favor to the brand.

That's the pattern. Optional is how Google introduces what later becomes the price of entry.

It's already visible one layer over, where Google now calls rich product attributes the entry requirement for its agentic retail surfaces, not a nice-to-have.

For now, conversational attributes are optional. Google's history suggests optional rarely stays that way.