Your products aren't showing on Google Shopping. Before you change anything, find out which of the four possible things is actually true — because the fixes have nothing in common, and the most expensive mistake here is rewriting a feed that was never the problem. Merchant Center will tell you which one you're in, under Products → All products and the issues view.
Step 1: are the products in Merchant Center at all?
Open Products → All products and read the total. If it's zero, or far short of your catalogue, nothing downstream matters — Google never received the products, so no amount of feed optimisation will help.
The usual causes, in the order they occur:
- The fetch failed. Settings → Data sources → your source shows the last fetch and its result. A URL that needs a login, a file behind Cloudflare, or a server that times out on a large catalogue all land here.
- The feed arrived empty or truncated. A page-cache plugin that caches a streamed feed will serve a valid-but-empty file — Google reports no error, because a well-formed document with zero products isn't broken, it's empty. Fetch your own feed URL twice in a row and compare the sizes.
- The feed expired. A data source that hasn't been fetched in 30 days empties itself. This is the one that bites stores that uploaded a file by hand once and assumed it was permanent.
Step 2: are they disapproved?
If the products are there but marked Not eligible or Disapproved, Google has read them and refused them, one by one. Every disapproval names its reason, and the reason is the fix. The four that account for most of them:
- Price or availability mismatch — the feed says one thing, the landing page says another. Google crawls the page and believes the page.
- Image problems — too small, a promotional overlay, a placeholder, or a URL Google can't open.
- Missing identifiers — strictly a warning rather than a disapproval, but it quietly costs you the auctions you would have won.
- A broken or redirecting link — an out-of-stock page, a country redirect, or an age gate Google's crawler can't pass.
Step 3: is the account itself suspended?
Account-level enforcement doesn't disapprove products one at a time — it takes everything down together. If every product stopped showing on the same day, this is almost certainly what happened, and no feed change will bring them back until the account is reinstated. The recovery path for the most common cause is in our misrepresentation checklist; the rules being enforced are the Shopping ads policies.
Step 4: approved, but still invisible
This is the case people misdiagnose most often, because the dashboard looks healthy. The products are active and eligible — they simply aren't winning anything. Check, in this order:
- Is there a campaign at all? Approved products appear in free listings, which are slow and partial. Paid visibility needs a Shopping or Performance Max campaign actually spending.
- Does the product match the search? Google matches queries to your product data, and the title carries most of that weight. A title that reads “SKU 4417 — blue” can't match anyone.
- Is it out of stock? Availability that says
out_of_stockis respected exactly: the product stays approved and stops showing. A feed that goes stale overnight does this to your bestsellers without telling you. - Is the country right? Products only show in the countries your feed and campaign both target, with a price in that country's currency.
The pattern underneath all four
Three of these four failures are freshness problems wearing different masks. A feed that was correct when you built it and is read again tomorrow describes a shop that no longer exists: prices moved, stock ran out, the source stopped being fetched. Nothing warns you, because from Google's side nothing is broken — it is reading exactly what you gave it.
That is the part FeedRobin is built around. Feeds are rebuilt when they're fetched rather than on a schedule, so a channel never reads yesterday's prices; Shopify changes arrive by webhook within minutes; and if your store goes down, the last good snapshot keeps serving instead of an empty file. The free feed check runs the same diagnostic as this page — it reads your feed, opens a sample of the product pages behind it, and tells you which of the four steps above you're actually in.
Sources
Google Merchant Center Help: issues and how to request a review, the product data specification, the link and availability attributes, and the Shopping ads policies.