So you’ve set up Google Merchant Center, uploaded your product feed, and you’re ready to start selling through Google Shopping. Then you log in and are immediately met with bright red warning icons showing product disapprovals. If you’re unsure what they mean, or what you’re supposed to do next, you’re not alone. Product disapprovals are a common part of managing Merchant Center, but if left unchecked, they can quickly impact performance.
Disapprovals don’t just prevent individual products from showing in Google Shopping results. If issues pile up, they can trigger account-level warnings or even a full account suspension. The result is lost visibility, reduced reach, and ultimately lost revenue. That’s why understanding how to identify and manage disapprovals is critical to keeping your feed healthy.
The first step is simply staying informed. You should be checking Merchant Center at least as often as your feed uploads daily, if possible, and no less than three times a week. Even if your feed isn’t updated daily, issues can still appear. It’s also important to make sure email notifications are enabled in the Settings section of Merchant Center. Confirm that the correct email addresses are receiving alerts for critical account and technical issues. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it exists.
When you log into Merchant Center, the default view is the Dashboard. This provides a high-level snapshot of your feed’s health over the past 30 days, showing how many products are active, disapproved, expiring soon, or awaiting review. The color-coded graph makes it easy to spot issues at a glance, and hovering over each section reveals the exact counts and timestamps for each status.
While the dashboard gives you a quick overview, the real work happens in the Diagnostics tab. This is where Merchant Center breaks down current issues into three categories: Account, Feeds, and Items. Any category with issues will be highlighted, with notifications shown in blue, warnings in yellow, and errors in red.
Account-level issues affect your entire Merchant Center account. These often appear as warnings that can escalate into account suspensions if not resolved by a specific deadline. Clicking the text bubble next to an issue provides details about the problem and whether a due date applies. If a warning does include a deadline, Google will review your feed on that date and suspend the account if the issue remains unresolved. Google may perform one courtesy review before the deadline if requested, but if the issue isn’t fixed, the warning will remain until the final review.
Feed-level issues indicate something has gone wrong with your feed itself, such as a failed upload. When this happens, Merchant Center continues using the last successfully uploaded feed, which can cause pricing mismatches, incorrect availability, and other downstream problems. Feed issues should always be addressed as quickly as possible to prevent larger disruptions.
Item-level issues are where most disapprovals live, and where you’ll likely spend the majority of your time. In the Items section of Diagnostics, issues are grouped by type, with disapproved products (errors) listed at the top, followed by warnings and notifications. Each issue shows how many products are affected and includes a “Learn more” link to Google’s support documentation.
Clicking the affected item count opens a sample list of up to 50 impacted products. For each item, you’ll see details like the item ID, last crawl date, feed ID, current status, and data related to the specific disapproval reason. Clicking into an individual product opens its Merchant Center product page, where you can review all submitted feed data alongside the exact reason the item was disapproved.
While Merchant Center only displays a sample of affected items in the interface, you can download a full CSV of item-level issues from the Current issues > Items screen. This file allows you to sort and filter by issue type, making it much easier to identify all affected SKUs and prioritize fixes.
At this point, you should have a solid understanding of where to find disapprovals in Google Merchant Center and how to dig down to the individual product level. In upcoming articles, we’ll walk through common disapproval types and the steps needed to resolve them, because a healthy product feed is the foundation of strong performance and sustainable growth in Google Shopping.
For more information about Google Merchant Center, read our other blogs:
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- How to Fix [size] Attributes in Google Merchant Center (The Right Way)
- How to Fix ‘Invalid Value: Color’ in Google Merchant Center
- How to Set Up a Promotion in Google Merchant Center
- Understanding GTINs in Google Merchant Center