Google's Misrepresentation policy covers listings or destinations that deceive users by excluding relevant product information or providing misleading information about products and businesses. For three of its six parts (unacceptable business practices, coordinated deceptive practices, dishonest pricing and transaction conditions), Merchant Center accounts are suspended upon detection and without prior warning, and the merchant is not allowed to list content again; an appeal can be submitted if the merchant believes there was an error. For the other three (unavailable offers, manipulated media, unreliable claims), a warning is issued at least 7 days before any suspension.
What “misrepresentation” actually means
Google isn't accusing you of fraud. The policy fires when the automated review can't confirm your store is a transparent, contactable business whose listings match reality. It judges your website as much as your feed — which is why fixing products alone rarely lifts it.
The recovery checklist
Work through every item — Google re-reviews the whole account, so one missed signal keeps the suspension in place.
1. Contact information, visible and real. A dedicated contact page with at least two of: physical address, phone number, email. In the site footer, not buried. The business name should match your Merchant Center “Business information” exactly.
2. Return, refund and shipping policies. Dedicated pages, linked from the footer, with concrete terms — timeframes, who pays return shipping, how refunds are issued. “Contact us for details” doesn't count. Shipping costs in Merchant Center must match what checkout actually charges.
3. Prices and availability that match. The feed price must equal the page price at all times — stale feeds after a sale are a classic trigger. Products marked in stock must be purchasable. If your feed updates daily but prices change more often, that gap is visible to Google.
4. A complete checkout. Google's crawler goes as far as the payment step. Broken carts, forced account creation with no guest option, or surprise fees at the last step all read as misrepresentation.
5. Professional basics. HTTPS everywhere, no placeholder pages (“lorem ipsum”, empty About), working links, a privacy policy. New domains with thin content get suspended more — add real substance before requesting review.
6. Consistent business identity. Domain, store name, legal entity on the terms page, and Merchant Center business info should all tell the same story. A mismatch between “About us” and the registered name on your invoices is enough.
Requesting the review
Google's Issues in Merchant Center page says that when an account or product is disapproved you can fix the problem and request a review, and that, depending on the violation, there might be extra verification steps and a limit on how many reviews you can request. Account-level issues show in a banner at the top of the Merchant Center account, where Review and fix (or Fix) follows the in-product flow; they are also under Products (in “Products & store”) → Needs attention → View setup and policy issues. The same page notes that the review at the end of a warning period can take up to 7 days to complete.
Preventing the next one
Most re-suspensions come from drift: a sale ends and the feed lags, products go out of stock but keep advertising, a policy page gets lost in a redesign. A feed that refreshes automatically and flags mismatches before Google sees them removes the biggest class of triggers.
How FeedRobin helps
FeedRobin keeps your feed synchronized with your store — prices are never rewritten by rules, out-of-stock products are marked correctly so ads pause on their own, and the quality score surfaces the catalog issues that feed misrepresentation reviews. Start with the free feed check: it reads any feed URL and lists the price, image and identifier problems a reviewer would see. The website-side checklist above stays yours; the feed side runs itself.
Sources
Google Merchant Center Help: the Misrepresentation policy, the wider Shopping ads policies, and Issues in Merchant Center for requesting a review.