Phyron's Inventory Ads now includes a ready-made feed for Google vehicle ads, often called Vehicle Listing Ads (VLAs).
Phyron builds the feed from your stock and your images, and hosts it at a URL you add to Google Merchant Center. Google then fetches it each day, so your vehicle ads stay in step with what is on your forecourt.
This article explains what Google vehicle ads are, what the Phyron feed does for you, and how to connect it in five steps.
What are Google vehicle ads?
Google vehicle ads are visual listings of the actual cars in your stock, shown to people searching for a car like yours nearby. Each ad shows the car's photo, make, model, price and your dealership name, and links straight to the vehicle's page on your website. Google still widely calls them Vehicle Listing Ads, or VLAs.
They run from two Google tools working together:
- Google Merchant Center holds your vehicle data: one entry per car, with its details and images.
- Google Ads serves the ads through a Performance Max campaign, which tests your vehicles across Google's networks to find buyers.
As of this feature upgrade (October 2026), Google vehicle ads are fully available in the United States, Canada and Australia. They are in open beta in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, where Google must approve your Merchant Center account first. Availability changes, so check Google's vehicle ads overview for the latest list.
How Phyron helps
The Phyron feed gives Google images and vehicle data that already meet its vehicle ads rules, so your cars go live instead of being disapproved.
Google is strict about vehicle images, and it can't fix them for you: automatic image improvements aren't supported for vehicle ads. Listings are commonly disapproved for:
- watermarks, logos or text laid over the image, including dealership banners and price graphics
- placeholder or stock photos instead of the actual car (stock images are allowed for new cars only if they match the make, model and colour)
- a cropped image that doesn't show the whole car
Google also recommends a 4:3 image, a front three-quarter view as the main image, and a clean, uncluttered background.
The Phyron feed takes care of this for you:
- Optimised images. Your Phyron images are prepared to Google's vehicle ads guidelines: the real car, shown in full, on a clean background, without overlays.
- Fewer rejections. Because the images and data are built to Google's specification, you spend less time fixing disapproved listings in Merchant Center.
- Always up to date. The feed is built from your stock and refreshed daily, so sold cars drop out and new arrivals appear without manual uploads.
See Google's vehicle ads image guidelines for the full rules.
Read our guide here for how to get started! Any questions? Reach out to us on support@phyron.com