Spec Watch #001: the ten load-bearing rules, verified

Every Shelfgrade audit rule cites the vendor document it derives from, and an automated agent re-verifies the load-bearing claims against the live primary sources weekly. When a vendor changes their spec, that becomes a Spec Watch entry with the verbatim before/after language. This entry is the baseline: what we check, and where it stands.

The ten claims, as verified against the live documents (initial full verification 2026-08-27, re-confirmed by the weekly run):

1. OpenAI’s native feed schema lists gtin as optional; twelve fields including item_id, price (“79.99 USD” format) and target_countries are required.
2. A Google-compatible parser profile exists, requiring id, title, description, link, image_link, availability, price, brand per row — and a valid gtin or mpn unless identifier_exists is “no.”
3. Parser selection is file-level, OpenAI-schema-first, never per-row.
4. Accepted formats are parquet/jsonl.gz/csv.gz/tsv.gz (SFTP path) or delimited .txt/.tsv/.csv; XML, RSS and Atom are not accepted in either mode.
5. The availability enum is in_stock / out_of_stock / pre_order / backorder / unknown, with availability_date required for pre-orders.
6. OpenAI documents four crawlers; opting out of OAI-SearchBot removes a site from ChatGPT search answers, while GPTBot is training-only.
7. Perplexity documents exactly two agents: PerplexityBot (gates search inclusion) and Perplexity-User (“generally ignores robots.txt rules”).
8. Google-Extended “does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal” — AI features in Search are controlled via Googlebot.
9. Google Merchant Center requires id/title/description/link/image_link/availability/price; gtin is “It Depends (strongly recommended if available)” with disapproval for wrong values.
10. Google’s merchant-listing structured data requires Product name, image, and an Offer with price and priceCurrency — and an Offer, not AggregateOffer.

Status (updated 2026-10-07): claims 1 and 5 have drifted. OpenAI rewrote its feed reference between Aug 28 and Sep 9, 2026; Spec Watch #002 has the verbatim before and after. The other eight held at the 2026-09-30 weekly run. When any claim drifts, the change gets a dated Spec Watch entry with the exact old and new language. That is the entire editorial policy of this page: primary sources, verbatim quotes, no speculation.