Google Merchant Center product disapproved: the data behind each issue, and how to fix it in the file

Where a disapproval comes from, and where to find it

When a Google Merchant Center product is disapproved, Google’s status page names two common kinds of reason: policy disapprovals, where your website or the product breaks a Shopping policy, and data quality disapprovals, where “Your product doesn’t comply with our product data specification”.¹ This post is about the second kind, because that is where a supplier spreadsheet does its damage.

A barcode that Excel turned into 5.01235E+12, a price typed as £129.99, a stock column that says Yes, a title in capitals with FREE P&P on the end: none of these is what Google’s specification asks for, and each is a value you can correct before the feed is built.

Google lists every product-level issue under Products, on the Needs attention tab, where you can filter the affected products by status, title or what needs attention and download the whole list as a CSV.³ Click in the What needs attention column on any product to see what is wrong with it.⁴

Some of Google’s pages name a Diagnostics section as well: the image link page says a product that fails its image requirements is disapproved and “you will be notified in the Diagnostics section of your Merchant Center account”.⁵

Not approved, limited or a warning: what each means

Google gives every product one of five statuses: Under review, Processing, Approved, Limited and Not approved.¹ Two of those matter here, along with one kind of issue that is not a status at all.

Not approved means “The product can’t be shown on Google.”¹ Google’s issues page spells out the consequence: “Disapproved products stop showing across Google. The product-level issue will need to be fixed before the product can be re-approved.”³

Limited means the product “is only showing on Google in some instances or all of the product data may not be shown on the ad”.¹ A missing barcode is one data cause of limited performance, with an issue of its own: Limited performance due to missing value: GTIN [gtin].⁶

Warnings are the other type of product-level issue beside disapprovals. Products with warnings “will continue to show across Google; however, their performance may be limited. If warnings aren’t resolved, they can lead to disapprovals.”³ A title over the length limit is one: Google truncates it, and “You’ll receive a warning indicating that the title has been truncated.”⁷

Most issues stay with the product that has them: “Product-level issues only affect individual products, not your entire account.”³ Price and availability go further. When they differ between your data and your landing pages, Google can apply a pre-emptive item disapproval, erring “on the side of caution”, and only a review lifts it.³ A price mismatch “may lead to an account suspension”, and “Too many products with incorrect availability can lead to account suspension.”⁸⁹

The issues that start in a supplier file

Google’s specification marks every attribute Required, It depends or Optional, and Required means what it says: “Submit this attribute. If you don’t, your product won’t be able to be served in ads and free listings.”² Title, price, availability and image link are all Required, and a GTIN is required for every product with a known one “to enable full offer performance”.²

One rule has a date of its own: from 31 January 2027, every product image must be at least 500 × 500 pixels, which Google Shopping image requirements covers in full.⁵

Identifiers: the invalid, the missing and the wrong GTIN

The barcode column is the one a spreadsheet damages without anyone noticing. Open a CSV of barcodes in Excel and a 13-digit EAN displays as 5.01235E+12; save it as CSV and the digits are gone. GTIN, EAN, UPC and MPN explained covers how that happens and how to get the number back. Google’s fix page for Invalid value [gtin] wants a number of 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits, with spaces and dashes “accepted, but ignored”.¹⁰ A decimal point and a letter E are neither.

Three other shapes of the same failure come out of supplier files:

• The wrong length. A UPC that lost its leading zero when the column was formatted as a number has 11 digits, a length Google’s format does not list.¹⁰
• Another product’s code. One barcode copied down a column of sizes or colours. Google says each variant “has its own GTIN”, tells you not to reuse a GTIN from another product, and says a product with an incorrect GTIN “will be disapproved”.¹²¹¹²
• A failed check digit. The last digit is calculated from the others, so one mistyped digit fails the check. Google asks that it be “present and correct”, and rules out GS1’s restricted ranges, prefixes 02, 04 or 2, and coupon ranges, 05, 98 or 99.¹²

A blank or N/A raises a different issue. Limited performance due to missing value: GTIN [gtin] appears when a product sits in a category “that we suspect should have a GTIN” and none was sent, and such products “may have limited visibility”.⁶ Google’s GTIN page is firmer: “if the product does have a GTIN assigned and you don’t submit it, the product could be disapproved.”¹²

For a code you cannot confirm, Google’s rule is plain: “Don’t guess or make up a value. If you’re unsure of a GTIN, don’t submit one.”¹² Some products genuinely have none: Google says shop-brand products and products you are the only seller of may not have a GTIN, and asks for brand and MPN for those instead.¹²

Price and availability: the feed against the page

Price and availability are checked twice, once against the specification and once against your website. Googlebot compares the price in your data with the price on the landing page or in its structured data, and “When a mismatch is found between your price on the landing page when it loads and the price [price] in the data source, the product with the mismatch may be disapproved.”⁸ For availability, a mismatch between the landing page, structured data, checkout and your data “will trigger a product disapproval”.²¹

The price format is a number and an ISO 4217 currency code, as in 15.00 GBP, so £129.99 goes in as 129.99 GBP.² For every country except the US and Canada, the specification says to “Include Value Added Tax (VAT) or goods and services tax (GST) in the price.”² That rule catches trade files: a supplier’s price list is often ex VAT, so a feed built from it sits below the page by the whole of the VAT.

Google’s common reasons for Mismatched product price include updates to the website and to Merchant Center made at different times, incorrect structured data, a sale price with the wrong effective dates or time zone, and a one-unit price on a product sold in minimum quantities.⁸ The test is exact: “Prices reflected in the HTML need to match exactly the prices uploaded in Merchant Center.”⁸

Availability takes four values: in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder and backorder.² Supplier stock columns say Yes, 12, Call or Low, and Google’s example of an unrecognised value is plain: you could submit in_stock or out_of_stock “but you cannot submit ‘pending’”.¹⁴ Three more rules catch supplier data. Pre-order is only for products not yet released, pre-order and backorder both need an availability date, and discontinued products should be removed rather than marked out of stock.²¹

Merchant Center’s automations, on by default, can update price and availability from what its crawler finds on your site.²² Google says they “aren’t a replacement for regular updates of your product data”, and that where values change often, “The product may be disapproved instead of updated if we detect a mismatch.”²²

How to clear a disapproval, step by step

Google’s fix pages end the same way: correct the data, upload it again, and check that the issue has left Needs attention. These steps add the part they leave to you, finding the cause in the file so the correction holds.

1. Download the list. Products, then Needs attention, filter to one issue, then the download icon for a CSV of every product it affects.³
2. Group by issue, not by product. One damaged column can produce hundreds of rows with the same issue.
3. Go back to the source for identifiers. The supplier’s original file before Excel opened it, the packaging, or the manufacturer’s page. Never rebuild a barcode by guessing digits.¹²
4. Correct the catalogue, not the Merchant Center editor. Google’s Needs attention page says that “if you uploaded your products using a file, a change made in the product editor will override the change in the file.”⁴ An editor fix stays put while your catalogue moves on.
5. Match the page for price and availability. Compare the feed with the landing page and its structured data, and schedule feed updates to coincide with changes to the website.⁹
6. Upload again and wait. Google says a change may take 24 to 72 hours to be reflected on the Needs attention page.¹⁰
7. Request a website check. On the product, under What needs attention, choose Request website check if you have fixed the issue, or I disagree with the issue if you believe Google is wrong.²³ A review may take up to seven working days, and approved products are eligible to show across Google within 24 hours.²³

Here is one supplier row for a cordless drill, as it arrived and as it went to Google.

Fix the file, not just the feed

The feed is built from the catalogue, and the catalogue from the supplier file. A disapproval cleared only at the end of that chain comes back with the next delivery, because the value that caused it is still in the spreadsheet. The place to fix a rounded barcode, a price with a pound sign or a title in capitals is the moment the file arrives, and identifiers, values and titles are three parts of what product data enrichment covers.

That is the part RefynData’s product data enrichment service takes on. Each SKU or barcode is matched to the real product and each source page is checked to show that product, so a GTIN comes from the product, not from a rounded cell. Non-values such as N/A are cleared, and titles are written from values already in the data, to enforced length limits.

Nothing unconfirmed is guessed: a value no source confirms is listed as unchecked, not filled in, which is Google’s own rule for identifiers.

Start with the CSV from Needs attention, grouped by issue. Trace each issue to its column in the supplier file and fix the column, not the row. Then upload again, request a website check, and run the same checks on the next delivery before it reaches your catalogue, with a product data quality checklist to keep them in.