AbstractSuffix trees are an important data structure at the core of optimal solutions to many fundamental string problems, such as exact pattern matching, longest common substring, matching statistics, and longest repeated substring. Recent lines of research focused on extending some of these problems to vertex-labeled graphs, either by using efficient ad-hoc approaches which do not generalize to all input graphs, or by indexing difficult graphs and having worst-case exponential complexities. In the absence of an ubiquitous and polynomial tool like the suffix tree for labeled graphs, we introduce the labeled direct product of two graphs as a general tool for obtaining optimal algorithms in the worst case: we obtain conceptually simpler algorithms for the quadratic problems of string matching () and longest common substring () in labeled graphs. Our algorithms run in time linear in the size of the labeled product graph, which may be smaller than quadratic for some inputs, and their run-time is predictable, because the size of the labeled direct product graph can be precomputed efficiently. We also solve on graphs containing cycles, which was left as an open problem by Shimohira et al. in 2011. To show the power of the labeled product graph, we also apply it to solve the matching statistics () and the longest repeated string () problems in labeled graphs. Moreover, we show that our (worst-case quadratic) algorithms are also optimal, conditioned on the Orthogonal Vectors Hypothesis. Finally, we complete the complexity picture around by studying it on undirected graphs.