Products are usually disapproved because their data breaks Google's product data requirements or Shopping policies, or doesn't match the product page: a different price or availability, a broken link, a missing or wrong GTIN, or an image with promotional overlays. Merchant Center shows the exact reason for each product in the Needs attention tab under Products.
Merchant Center checks two things for every product: the product data you submit and the product page it links to. When either one fails a requirement, the product gets an issue, and the issue tells you what to fix.
Google separates product-level issues, which affect single products, from setup and policy issues, which affect your whole account. If a banner at the top of Merchant Center shows a setup or policy problem, start there, because no product fix will help until it is resolved.
What do the statuses and issues mean?
| Status or issue | What it means |
|---|---|
| Warning | The product still shows across Google, but performance may be limited. Unresolved warnings can turn into disapprovals. |
| Limited | The product shows only in some cases, or not all of its data is shown. |
| Not approved (disapproved) | The product stops showing across Google until you fix the issue. |
| Preemptive item disapproval | Price or availability doesn't match between your data and your product page, so Google disapproves products likely to violate requirements as a precaution. |
What are the most common causes?
Google lists these as the usual reasons:
- Price or availability mismatch. Google's crawler compares your data with the product page. Typical causes are a delay between site and feed updates, broken structured data, dynamic pricing, or wrong dates and time zones in
sale_price_effective_date. - Product identifiers. A missing or incorrect GTIN usually limits how often the product shows, and in some cases (Google mentions it for Shopify stores, for example) an incorrect GTIN leads to a disapproval.
- Images. Promotional overlays, placeholders and images that are too small. See whether product images can have promotional text.
- Page problems. Broken links, server errors or slow loading, redirects to a generic page instead of the product page, or robots.txt blocking Googlebot or Googlebot-image.
- Content problems. Placeholder content, inaccurate descriptions, or categories that differ between your store and your data.
How do you fix it and get products approved?
- Go to Products, then the Needs attention tab. Filter by issue, status or impact, or download the full list as a CSV.
- Open an issue. The Issue Details Page shows the impact, example products and the steps to fix it.
- Correct the product data or the page, then re-upload your product data. Google recommends fixing product-level issues this way.
- Request a review if the issue doesn't clear. Google says reviews can take up to 7 days.
- Turn on automatic item updates in the Automations tab under Products to reduce preemptive disapprovals caused by price and availability mismatches.
In practice: fix the problem where the data comes from, your store or your feed tool, not with a one-off edit in Merchant Center. Then the same issue doesn't come back with the next update.
If whole groups of products are disapproved at once, or the account is under a policy warning, read how to fix a misrepresentation issue. For the basics of how product data feeds your ads, see my guide to Google Shopping ads.
Sources
- Google Merchant Center Help: Issues in Merchant Center - https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/12153802
- Google Merchant Center Help: Check product visibility and status in Merchant Center - https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/12488713
- Google Merchant Center Help: Fixing Merchant Center disapprovals for product data quality violations - https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/13693497
- Google Merchant Center Help: How to fix: Mismatched product price - https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/12159029