Paste the issue name from your Diagnostics page and get the cause, the exact fix steps, and whether it needs an account review — covering the 16 recurring product-data disapprovals.
Prefer the full walkthrough? Read the complete disapprovals guide →
🔒 Matched entirely in your browser — nothing is sent to a server.
The product has no unique identifier. Google expects a GTIN, or an MPN plus brand, for products that have them.
The submitted GTIN fails validation — wrong format or failing GS1 check digit. The classic own-goal is an internal SKU pasted into the GTIN field.
Usually a real barcode mangled in transit — spreadsheets strip the leading zero from a GTIN that starts with 0, leaving 11 or 12 digits.
The GTIN is not registered to the brand you submitted — Google cross-checks ownership against the GS1 registry, so a checksum-valid but unassigned code still fails.
The feed price disagrees with the landing page or its structured data — a stale sale, currency/tax difference, or stale on-page JSON-LD.
Feed says “in stock” but the page shows sold out (or vice versa) — often a sell-out that outran the feed refresh, or stale structured data.
The main image is a logo, “no image available” graphic, or placeholder instead of the actual product.
The image contains promotional text, a watermark, badge, or call-to-action obstructing the product.
Below the minimum 100×100 px (250×250 px for apparel).
ALL-CAPS or gimmicky capitalization in the title — the pattern correlates with spam.
Pricing, shipping promises, or calls to action (“sale”, “free shipping”, “buy now”) inside title/description — prohibited by the product data spec.
Brand is required for new products (except movies, books, music) — and “N/A”, “Generic”, or “No brand” are rejected values.
google_product_category doesn’t match the official taxonomy — e.g. only the last segment (“Tuxedos”) instead of the ID or full path.
Apparel products require gender, age_group, color, and size; jammed-together or non-colour values (“RedPinkBlue”, “N/A”) are rejected.
Google’s crawler can’t fetch your landing pages — usually robots.txt blocking Googlebot/Googlebot-image, or aggressive bot protection.
The link 404s, times out, redirects to a generic page, or shows a different product/price/stock than the feed.
Stop fixing disapprovals one by one
FeedArc validates every product at import — GTIN check digits, required attributes, image rules, title formatting — and fixes recurring patterns with feed rules, so these issues are caught before Google ever sees the feed.
Item-level issues re-check automatically 3–5 business days after you fix and re-upload the data — no button to press. The two PID issues (price and availability mismatch) are account-level: fix the data and request the review, and never request it before the fix is verified, because a failed review starts a cool-down that locks the button.
The full mechanics — warning windows, review timelines, and the fix workflow — are in the Google Merchant Center disapprovals guide.
In Merchant Center open Products → Diagnostics → Item issues. Each row carries the precise issue name (e.g. “Invalid value (GTIN)”, “Mismatched value (price)”) plus the affected item count. Paste that name into this tool to jump straight to the cause and fix.
Preemptive item disapproval — the special account-level state Google applies to price and availability mismatches. The affected items are disapproved immediately, and fixing the data alone is not enough: you must also request an account review to clear it. Every other issue follows the ordinary item-level path, where a fix is re-checked automatically in 3–5 business days.
This diagnostic covers the recurring product-data disapprovals. Policy violations (misrepresentation, restricted products) and destination-specific issues follow different flows. Start from the full disapprovals guide, which also explains the general fix workflow: read the exact issue, classify it as feed / landing page / image, fix at the source, validate, re-upload.
Mostly, yes. The deterministic classes — GTIN check digits, missing required attributes, image sizes, title formatting, category values — are all checkable before upload. Validating the feed at import time (and fixing recurring patterns with feed rules) turns these from monthly Diagnostics surprises into build-time errors.