Adam Hafez
Key takeaways
- Product videos submitted to Merchant Center are reported to sit in the preview processing status and never play on listings.
- Joey Bidner spotted the problem and Emmanuel Flossie says it affects both YouTube links and self-hosted videos.
- Search Engine Roundtable says there is no ETA for a fix, that reports suggest it is widespread, and that it found no statement from Google.
- The reports come from merchants and consultants, not from Google, so the scale of the problem is unconfirmed.
Merchants are reporting an error in Google Merchant Center: product videos get stuck in the “preview processing” status, so they look static in product listings. The report was first spotted by Joey Bidner and written up on LinkedIn by Emmanuel Flossie on 13 October 2026, then picked up by Search Engine Roundtable.
What are merchants seeing?
Per Search Engine Roundtable, open a product that has a video attached in Merchant Center and its status sits in preview processing and does not move forward. The video then looks static and unplayable on Google Search product listings and other surfaces.
Emmanuel Flossie wrote on LinkedIn that he checked and verified that both YouTube and self-hosted videos do not get processed and do not show on live Google Shopping listings.
Which videos are affected?
Search Engine Roundtable quotes him saying it happens to all videos, including those on YouTube and from third-party platforms. We could not open his own write-up on his site, which blocked our request, so that wording is as reported by Search Engine Roundtable.
Has Google responded?
Search Engine Roundtable says there is no ETA for a fix and that the problem looks widespread according to reports. It cites no statement from Google, and we found none. We also did not find a Merchant Center Community thread that we could verify.
What should merchants do?
Check the status of a product video in Merchant Center before assuming your own setup is wrong. Emmanuel Flossie asks merchants who submit videos to check and send feedback to Google so it can fix the problem. For more on feeds and listings, see ecommerce SEO and the earlier note on Merchant Center disapproving products that change often.
The evidence
- Type
- industry
- Impact
- low
- Affects
- Merchant Center, Product videos, Shopping listings
Sources
- 1.Submitted Videos Are Not Showing in Google Shopping - Emmanuel Flossie on LinkedIn, October 13, 2026Primary
- 2.Google Merchant Center Videos Stuck In Preview Processing - Search Engine Roundtable, October 13, 2026
Frequently asked questions
What is the Merchant Center video problem?
Merchants report that product videos submitted to Merchant Center stay in the preview processing status and never play, so they look static in product listings on Google Search and other surfaces.
Which videos are affected?
Emmanuel Flossie says it happens to all videos he checked, both YouTube links and videos hosted on a merchant's own website.
Has Google responded?
Search Engine Roundtable reports no ETA for a fix, and we found no statement from Google. Emmanuel Flossie asks affected merchants to send feedback to Google.
About the author
Founder, UpgradIQ FZC LLC
Adam Hafez works on technical SEO and search measurement: how pages get crawled, indexed, ranked and now quoted by answer engines. He founded UpgradIQ, which reads Google Search Console and GA4 to tie ranking movement back to the changes that caused it. He publishes what the data supports and states the limits of it.
- Technical SEO
- Search Console and GA4 measurement
- Answer engine optimization
- Structured data
The briefing
Only what actually changed in search, delivered in full by RSS, Atom or JSON feed.
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