Your products are disapproved.
The budget is still spending.

Merchant Center

A disapproved product stops showing in Shopping and Performance Max while the rest of the catalog keeps spending, so the symptom is usually falling revenue rather than an obvious error. Most disapprovals come from the feed and the landing page disagreeing about price or availability; the rest are image, identifier or policy problems. Account-level issues are a different and more urgent category.

First: is it one item or the whole account?

These look similar in the interface and are not remotely the same problem.

An item disapproval pulls specific products out of Shopping and leaves everything else running. It's routine. Any catalog of real size always has some.

An account-level issue — a warning, a suspension, or a policy flag against the store rather than a product — stops everything, and no amount of feed tidying fixes it. If both are present, the account issue is the only one worth working on until it's cleared.

Price and availability mismatches

This is the most common disapproval and the most frustrating, because the price usually looks correct when you check it.

The test Google applies is whether the value in the feed matches what a shopper actually sees on the landing page. Things that break it:

• Tax or currency configuration that doesn't match how the feed states price.
• Prices rendered by JavaScript, where the crawler sees a placeholder or nothing.
• Member, cart-level or regional pricing, so the number depends on who is looking.
• A feed that updates on a schedule while the site changes continuously, so the two drift between fetches.
• Availability that says in stock while the page shows sold out, or the reverse.

Check the landing page the way a crawler would rather than the way you do while logged in. Most "the price is right" disputes end there.

Images

Image rules are strict and mostly mechanical. Promotional text, watermarks, borders, logos pasted over the product, placeholder graphics and images that are too small all get rejected. So does a generic image standing in for a specific variant.

This is the easiest category to fix in bulk and the one most often left sitting, because each individual product looks fine to a human.

Identifiers and required attributes

Missing or wrong GTINs, absent brand, and missing condition are ordinary causes. Apparel has extra requirements — size, color, age group, gender — and a catalog that was built before those mattered tends to fail them all at once.

Where a product genuinely has no GTIN, the feed has to say so explicitly rather than leave the field empty. Silence is treated as an error, not as an answer.

Policy and the serious category

Some disapprovals are policy: restricted or prohibited products, claims that aren't allowed, or a landing page that can't be reached because it's blocked, broken or redirecting somewhere unexpected.

Then there's misrepresentation, which is the one to take seriously. It's an account-level judgment about the store's trustworthiness, not about a product, and it's usually triggered by missing or unconvincing basics: no visible contact details, no returns or refund policy, a checkout that looks unsafe, pricing that isn't clear until late in the flow, or claims the site can't support. Fixing it means fixing the store, not the feed.

Work it in the right order

1. Account-level issues first. Nothing else matters while the account is suspended.
2. Then whatever covers the most revenue. Diagnostics groups disapprovals by cause, so one fix often clears hundreds of items. Sort by what's actually selling, not by item count.
3. Fix at the source where you can, in the product data itself, so it stays fixed.
4. Use a supplemental feed where you can't — to correct or add fields without waiting on a platform migration or a developer queue.
5. Re-fetch, then request review. A fix that hasn't been fetched hasn't happened yet.

Then stop it recurring

Disapprovals are rarely a one-time event. Catalogs change, suppliers change, someone edits a template. What keeps the number near zero is dull and effective: watch the Diagnostics tab on a schedule rather than after a revenue drop, keep the feed fetching often enough to track site changes, and treat a sudden spike in disapprovals as an incident rather than a chore.

It's also worth knowing what a clean feed is for. In Shopping and Performance Max there are no keywords — Google reads the product data to decide which searches you appear for. Fixing disapprovals gets products back in the auction; feed quality decides how well they do once they're there.