Where to see what’s wrong
In Merchant Center, open Products & store → Products and switch to the Needs attention tab. It lists every product with issues, with the reason for each one. You can also see the status of an individual product in the full product list.
Tell two situations apart:
- Warning — the product shows, but its reach is limited. If you do nothing, it may eventually be disapproved.
- Disapproval — the product doesn’t show on Google until the issue is resolved.
Account-wide issues are on the same tab under View setup and policy issues, or in the banner at the top of Merchant Center (Review and fix). If there’s anything there, start with it: account issues can stop all products from showing at once.
Common reasons and what to do
The price in the feed doesn’t match the site
Google crawls the product page and compares the price with the one in the feed. A mismatch appears when the site price has changed but the feed updates once a day; when the site shows a sale price and the feed doesn’t; when the currency is given differently. The fix is to update the feed more often or automatically and use the same price and currency the shopper sees. For promotions, the feed has a separate sale price attribute — sale_price.
Availability doesn’t match
“In stock” in the feed but “out of stock” on the site, or the other way round. Same fix: sync the feed with your shop’s stock levels.
Wrong or missing GTIN
A GTIN is the manufacturer’s barcode — in Europe, usually an EAN. For branded products, Google expects the real code. Don’t make up codes or reuse one code for different products. If the product is your own make and has no barcode, say so in the feed with the identifier_exists attribute set to no.
Image problems
A placeholder instead of a photo, a watermark, text or promotional overlays on the product, an image that’s too small, or a link to an image that doesn’t load. You need a clean photo of the product itself, available at a direct link.
The product page doesn’t open
The link leads to a 404 page, to the home page or to an address blocked for crawlers in robots.txt. Google can’t check the product — so it disapproves it. Check your links and make sure Google’s crawlers can open your product pages.
The site lacks information for shoppers
Google expects your site to clearly state shipping and return terms, payment methods and the seller’s contact details. If that information is missing or hidden, the issue may affect the whole account rather than individual products.
How to fix and request a review
- Fix the cause at the data source: in the feed, in your shop module or directly in Merchant Center by editing the product.
- If there are many products, download the list of affected items from the Needs attention tab, fix them and upload the updated feed.
- When everything is fixed, request a review. If you’re sure there’s no error, you can say so and request a review as well.
The re-review takes anywhere from a few hours to a few days. An on-demand review can take up to 12 hours, and you can’t request another one during that time, so only click once everything is fixed.
How to avoid disapprovals in future
- Update the feed automatically rather than by hand once a week.
- Take price, availability and currency for both the site and the feed from one source — your shop system.
- Add Product structured data with price and availability to product pages: Google uses it to cross-check your data. How to test it — in the article on testing structured data.
- Look at the Needs attention tab once a week while the issues are still few.
In short
- See disapproval reasons under Products & store → Products → Needs attention.
- Solve account issues first, then individual products.
- The usual suspects are price, availability, GTIN, images and broken pages.
- Fix things at the data source, not only in Merchant Center.
- After fixing, request a review and wait for the result.
If there are many disapprovals or the whole account is at risk, we can set up Google Merchant Center for you: build the feed, fix the errors and get your products showing on Google.
