About disapprovals for product data quality violations

To ensure the success of your products and provide a good experience for people who are shopping, follow the product data specification when submitting your product data to Google. If your data doesn't meet the data quality requirements for a destination, your products and your entire Merchant Center account for that destination are subject to disapproval. Since disapproved products can’t be shown in Shopping ads and free product listings, it’s important to identify the reason for disapproval and take the necessary steps to fix the issue.

Note: Products submitted in feeds that have multiple countries or destinations may receive different disapprovals or warnings across multiple countries and destinations due to policy differences. Consider adjusting the selection of countries for your feed, or use the excluded countries for Shopping ads [shopping_ads_excluded_countries] attribute to exclude countries for individual products.

Product disapprovals

Individual products submitted via data feeds and the Content API for Shopping are regularly reviewed. If the data you provide doesn’t match the product information on your website or doesn’t comply with the product data specification, these products may be disapproved. Disapproved products will stop showing for that destination. You’ll need to review the disapproved products and make sure you submit accurate product data if you want to show these products on Shopping ads and free listings again.

What to do

Review the "Item issues" tab on the Diagnostics page in your Merchant Center account to identify the disapprovals affecting products in your account. Use the “Learn more” links to look up the specific steps to resolve the issues.

To help prevent disapprovals related to price and availability, you can enable automatic item updates, a feature that may reduce the risk of preemptive product disapproval for price and availability mismatches.

If you’ve received a disapproval, take the following steps:

1. Make corrections to your product data and resubmit it. Make sure you’ve implemented a long-term solution to prevent future violations.
2. After you’ve updated any disapproved products with accurate information and then uploaded them again, they will be re-reviewed. It could take up to 12 hours to verify that the data violation has been fixed.

Note: Disapproved products will be regularly evaluated, and will be re-approved if the issue is resolved. Automatically reapproved products are still subject to future disapprovals.

To help fix disapprovals related to promotional overlay on images, we recommend you enable automatic image improvements. This feature will try to automatically fix these images by removing promotional overlays. If the removal is successful, the image will be replaced and the products will be reapproved. Learn more about automatic image improvements

Product warnings

Warnings let you know about issues that are currently limiting the performance of your ads and free listings or that may lead to product or account suspensions in the future if you don’t resolve them.

Products that are missing required unique product identifiers (UPIs) receive warnings. These products will continue to show in Shopping ads and free listings, but their performance may be limited. Similar products with correct UPIs will receive higher priority over products without correct UPIs.

Make sure to provide the correct UPIs to maximize the performance of your products.

Request a review for product data GTIN requirements

Depending on the type of product you submit, you may be required to provide unique product identifiers (such as an MPN [mpn], GTIN [gtin], or brand [brand] attribute). For some products, you will need to use the GTIN [gtin] attribute. If you submit a product without the GTIN [gtin] attribute when it would normally be required, your product’s performance may be limited, or if you submit a product with an incorrect GTIN value, your product will be disapproved.

If you believe that the GTIN value you’ve provided is correct, you can request a review through your Merchant Center account.

To request a manual review:

1. Sign in to your Merchant Center account.
2. From the navigation menu, click "Products", then click "All products".
3. Click on the title of the products to view the individual products page.
4. Find the “Item status” section. Find the issue “Policy violations: Product data GTIN requirements”, and click "Request review" under the “Actions” column.
5. Review the GTIN [gtin] attribute requirements related to your disapproval, then check the box to acknowledge that you’ve reviewed the information.
6. Select "Request manual review".

It may take up to 7 business days to complete the manual review. Products that are approved as a result of the review will be eligible to show in Shopping ads and free listings within 24 hours.

If you’d like to see a full report of GTIN-related issues, click "Products" on the navigation menu, then click "Diagnostics". From the "Item issues" tab you can download full reports of each issue, including the affected products.