Merchant Center policies: which get a warning

Google rewrote seven Merchant Center policy pages in the last week of September 2026. Search Engine Roundtable reported the update and summarised it with an AI model. We compared each page line by line with its last archived English copy instead, and the change that matters most is one that summary did not spell out: Google now says, policy by policy, whether a violation gets a warning first.

Warnings, policy by policy#

The archived pages all said the same generic thing: for most violations Google sends a warning email with 7 or 28 days to fix the issue, but it may not warn for egregious violations. That sentence is still there. What is new is a line under each policy or section:

Violations of this policy will not lead to immediate account suspension without prior warning. A warning will be issued at least 7 days prior to any suspension of your account.

It now appears on Dangerous products, Products that enable dishonest behavior, Sexual content and three sections of Misrepresentation. None of the archived copies of those pages carried it.

Misrepresentation, split#

The archived Misrepresentation page, captured on 4 September 2026, opened by calling violations of the whole policy egregious: serious enough to suspend an account without warning. The current page splits it, with the 7-day warning on half of its sections:

Section	Current label
Unacceptable practices	Egregious
Coordinated deception	Egregious
Dishonest pricing	Egregious
Unavailable offers	7-day warning
Manipulated media	7-day warning
Unreliable claims	7-day warning

For a store whose offers go out of stock or whose product claims get flagged, that is a real change: a warning comes first, where the archived page implied none at all. Counterfeit products stays egregious, as it was.

New examples#

The rewrite also adds examples that were not on the archived pages:

• Hidden locations. Misrepresentation now names hiding your business location, headquarters or source of fulfilment, showing a false or virtual address, and hiding where products ship from to look like local delivery.
• Faked activity and identity numbers. The dishonest behavior page adds falsified clicks, reviews or social media endorsements, and credit privacy numbers that mimic national ID numbers.
• VPNs and game cheats. The same page adds VPNs marketed to get around geo-restrictions, and game enhancements and cheat software under hacking devices.
• Guns. Dangerous products adds bump stocks to gun parts and paintball as a service to guns.
• Branding. Counterfeit products gains best practices: state official reseller partnerships, use your own branding, and do not misspell another brand’s name, an example that moved there from Misrepresentation.

Wording-only changes#

Most of the edits are vocabulary, and they are consistent across all seven pages. “Feed” appears 48 times in the archived copies and not once now; “data source” rises from 24 to 72 mentions. “Shopping ads” becomes “Shopping ads and listings”, and “listing” rises from 26 to 123 mentions, while the promotion wording drops from 56 to 15. Two pages were renamed: Adult-oriented content is now Sexual content, and Shopping ads policies is now Google’s Shopping ads and listings policies.

The appeal instructions did not change in substance: appeal mentions go from 309 to 307 across the seven pages. Merchant Center Next is not mentioned in either version.

How we checked#

We saved the current English page for each of the seven policies on 28 September 2026 and compared it with the latest English copy the Internet Archive held from before the update. For the policy overview, Misrepresentation and Editorial and professional requirements, those copies are from 10 September, 4 September and 30 August 2026. For Counterfeit products, Dangerous products, Products that enable dishonest behavior and Sexual content, the latest copies are from April to June 2026, so a change listed for those four could have been made at any point since then.

If you sell through Merchant Center, the structured data for product snippets is worth checking alongside these rules, since unavailable offers and unreliable claims now come with a warning window you can use to fix them.