Fixing Google Merchant Center Errors: The Most Common Disapprovals

Google Merchant Center Disapprovals: What Changed and Why They Still Hurt

Google Merchant Center disapprovals remain the number-one reason ecommerce teams lose Shopping ad coverage overnight. According to data from large-scale account audits, roughly 95 percent of disapprovals trace back to just five root causes: price mismatches, availability mismatches, identifier problems, image violations, and policy flags. The fix path is different for each, and blending them into a single to-do list wastes time.

This guide walks through the most common disapproval categories in 2026, including new requirements like the multi-channel product ID rule taking effect in March, and gives you a repeatable debugging workflow. If your broader feed setup still needs work, start with this product feed optimization guide first and come back here for the disapproval-specific playbook.

The Five Data Disapprovals That Hit Hardest

Data-quality disapprovals are the most recoverable. They do not require a formal policy appeal, just accurate corrections and a fresh feed submission. Google typically re-crawls within 24 to 72 hours after you upload the fix. Prioritize these high-frequency patterns.

Price mismatch between feed and landing page

This is consistently the single most common disapproval. It fires when the price in your submitted feed does not match the price visible on the product landing page, including any structured data markup. Common triggers include:

• Promotional pricing that updates in the storefront before the feed catches up.
• Currency or tax-display rules that differ by target country.
• Stale Product schema on the page that contradicts the live visible price.

The fix is straightforward: synchronize your feed refresh schedule with your pricing update cycle, and verify that structured data on the landing page matches the submitted value exactly. Enabling Google's automatic item updates can help buffer short-lived mismatches, but it is not a long-term substitute for feed accuracy.

Availability mismatch

Inventory moves faster than most export intervals. When your feed says in_stock but the landing page shows the product as out of stock, Merchant Center disapproves the offer. Google can also apply preemptive item disapproval (PID) when it suspects likely mismatches based on pattern detection.

• Increase feed refresh frequency for high-velocity SKUs.
• Pause volatile products during inventory sync delays.
• Audit the latency between your warehouse management system and storefront before peak sales periods.

Invalid or missing product identifiers

Google requires a valid GTIN for any product that has one. Submitting a malformed barcode, reusing the same GTIN across unrelated products, or omitting identifiers without properly setting identifier_exists to no all cause disapprovals and weaker ad matching.

• Enforce GTIN, brand, and MPN validation rules at the category level.
• Route products without identifiers into a separate exception queue.
• Reconcile supplier-provided barcodes against a reference database before import.

For catalogs with a mix of branded and private-label products, our missing EAN/GTIN workflow explains how to handle fallback logic without triggering compliance flags.

Image quality violations

Main product images must show the item clearly on a clean background, without promotional overlays, watermarks, logos, or placeholder graphics. Low-resolution images and images that do not match the specific variant also cause disapprovals.

• Block promotional text and badge overlays in main images at the import stage.
• Set a minimum resolution threshold (at least 800 by 800 pixels for most categories; apparel requires 1000 by 1000).
• Validate that variant-level images actually correspond to the listed color, size, or style.

New for 2026: multi-channel product ID conflicts

Starting in March 2026, Google requires merchants who sell both online and in-store to use separate product IDs whenever attributes differ between channels. If a product has a different price, availability, or condition in your physical store versus your online listing, a single shared ID will cause processing errors and disapprovals.

• Audit your catalog for products that appear in both online and local inventory feeds with differing attributes.
• Create distinct product IDs for each channel variant before the March enforcement deadline.
• Update any feed management tools or plugins to handle dual-ID generation.

This change is especially relevant for retailers using Local Inventory Ads. If you want a broader view of feed structure and taxonomy, see our Google product taxonomy mapping guide.

Policy Disapprovals: A Different Beast Entirely

Policy violations sit in a separate enforcement track. You cannot fix them by simply editing a feed attribute and resubmitting. They involve account trust, content claims, website quality, and compliance with Google's Shopping policies.

Common policy triggers

• Misrepresentation: inconsistent business information, hidden costs, or claims that do not match what the landing page delivers.
• Restricted content: products in regulated categories (health, financial, adult) without proper disclosures.
• Website trust gaps: broken checkout, missing refund policy, absent contact information, or insecure payment pages.
• Repeated data quality failures: if the same data errors recur over multiple review cycles, Google may reclassify them as a policy-level concern about your account's overall reliability.

The right way to handle a policy appeal

Data-quality appeals have a roughly 95 percent success rate when the underlying issue is actually fixed. Policy appeals, especially for misrepresentation or counterfeit flags, are far harder, often in the 10 to 20 percent range. The difference comes down to preparation.

1. Isolate affected products and markets so the problem does not spread during investigation.
2. Map each disapproval to the specific Google policy text and save the reference links.
3. Fix the website and offer context first, not just the feed. Policy reviewers check your live site.
4. Document every remediation action per issue category.
5. Submit the review request only after all related gaps are closed. Partial fixes almost always result in a rejected appeal.

Teams that treat policy remediation as a one-field fix instead of a comprehensive evidence package tend to fail the review and trigger longer cooldown periods. For a structured approach to data documentation, try our product data quality checklist.

A Step-by-Step Debugging Workflow When Disapprovals Spike

When your approved product count drops suddenly, the goal is fast classification and targeted fixes. This workflow works for feed teams, catalog ops, and PPC managers.

Step 1: Classify and quantify (5 minutes)

Open the Needs Attention tab in Merchant Center and sort issues by affected item count. Split every issue into one of three buckets: data, policy, or unknown. Focus first on issues hitting your top-revenue SKUs.

Step 2: Compare three layers of truth (10 minutes)

For each issue family, check:

1. Live landing page — what the customer actually sees.
2. Submitted feed payload — what you sent to Google.
3. Merchant Center processed value — what Google stored and flagged.

Most data disapprovals resolve once you find where these three layers diverge. Tools like Lasso can automate this comparison by validating channel-specific requirements before export, highlighting discrepancies before they become disapprovals.

Step 3: Apply targeted fixes (10 minutes)

• For price and availability mismatches: correct the source data and trigger a feed re-upload.
• For identifier issues: fix the GTIN or set identifier_exists appropriately, then resubmit.
• For image problems: replace the flagged image and clear the cache if your CDN serves stale versions.
• For policy issues: follow the full remediation workflow above. Do not rush the review request.

Step 4: Lock in prevention (5 minutes)

Every root cause you find should become a permanent validation rule. Set an alert threshold for sudden disapproval spikes and assign an owner with a response SLA. Teams that skip this step tend to repeat the same debugging cycle every few weeks.

If you want a structured pre-launch validation process, the feed QA checklist covers the full set of gates you should run before any major catalog push.

Building a Prevention System That Scales

Fixing disapprovals is necessary but insufficient. The real goal is to stop reintroducing the same defects with every catalog update. A lightweight governance model built around five practices can cut recurring disapprovals dramatically.

Schema contracts per destination. Define required, recommended, and conditional fields for each channel. Google Shopping, free listings, and Local Inventory Ads each have different attribute expectations. Having these documented prevents omissions at the export layer. Our catalog validation framework explains how to set this up systematically.

Pre-publish validation gates. Block any feed export when critical fields fail: price, availability, identifiers, image URL validity, and title length. This catches errors before Google does.

Structured data alignment checks. Regularly verify that the Product schema on your landing pages matches the values in your feed. Misalignment here is the root of most price and availability mismatches.

Diagnostic trend monitoring. Track disapprovals by issue family over time, not just the total count. A declining trend in one category and a rising trend in another tells you where your pipeline is degrading.

Supplier quality feedback loops. If certain suppliers consistently provide data that generates errors, feed that signal back upstream. Measure which source feeds cause the most disapprovals and hold them to quality standards.

With Lasso, teams can combine these controls into a single workflow: import raw supplier data, normalize attributes against channel specifications, run validation rules, and route flagged products into review queues before they ever reach Merchant Center. The result is fewer surprises in diagnostics and more consistent ad coverage.

Next Steps to Recover and Maintain Listing Health

Google Merchant Center disapprovals are rarely a one-time event. They are a recurring operations challenge that sits at the intersection of data quality, policy compliance, and publishing cadence. The teams that manage them well treat feed health as an ongoing process, not a periodic cleanup.

Here is the recommended order of operations:

1. Separate every disapproval into data versus policy.
2. Fix high-revenue data mismatches first using the three-layer comparison.
3. For policy issues, build a complete remediation package before requesting review.
4. Convert every recurring root cause into a permanent validation rule.
5. Audit the March 2026 multi-channel product ID requirement if you sell through both online and local inventory.
6. Review diagnostics weekly as a core operations KPI, alongside product title consistency and feed management best practices.

Feed quality is a competitive advantage. The merchants who keep their listings approved while competitors cycle through disapprovals capture disproportionate impression share. Investing in prevention pays for itself in recovered ad spend and sustained Shopping visibility.