How to Fix GMC Price & Availability Warning
Why You’re Seeing This Google Merchant Center Warning
Keeping your product data accurate and up to date is essential for maintaining visibility in Google Shopping. When your feed doesn’t match your landing pages, Google may trigger an Automatic Item Updates warning.
If left unresolved, these warnings can escalate into disapprovals, limited impressions, and reduced performance.
Here’s everything you need to know to understand and resolve Automatic Item Updates warnings effectively.
What Are Automatic Item Updates?
Automatic Item Updates allow Google to temporarily correct product listings when there’s a mismatch between your feed and your website. Instead of disapproving the product immediately, Google uses live website data to adjust:
Price
Availability
This helps keep listings active, but your account is still flagged with a warning until the feed is corrected.
Why Automatic Item Updates Matter
When used correctly, this feature keeps Shopping campaigns running smoothly. But it’s only a temporary safeguard, not a replacement for accurate feed data. Repeated warnings can damage account health and impact campaign performance.
Key benefits of Automatic Item Updates:
Prevents product disapprovals
Maintains listing activity during short mismatches
Protects ad relevance and user trust
Buys you time to fix feed issues
Common Causes of Price and Availability Warnings
Here are the triggers we see most often when managing feeds at scale:
Outdated prices in the feed – Website price updates, but the feed lags.
Website updates before feed syncs – A product goes out of stock, but the feed still shows availability.
Structured data mismatch – Schema markup displays different values from both feed and page content, and Google prioritises structured data.
Pro tip: Run Google’s Rich Results Test to check for structured data errors.Shared URLs for product variants - If size or colour variants share one URL, Google may crawl the wrong version and pick up incorrect details.
Pro tip: Use unique variant URLs wherever possible, or workarounds to ensure accuracy.
How to Fix Price and Availability Warnings
Follow these steps to resolve warnings:
Keep feed data in sync with your website: Submit updated feeds frequently, especially during sales or seasonal changes.
Match update frequency with real-time changes: Faster syncing reduces the risk of discrepancies.
Correct structured data: Align price and availability across your site, feed, and schema.
Use unique URLs for variants: Ensure Google sees the correct version of each product.
When Will the Warning Disappear?
Once your feed reflects the correct data, Google automatically resolves the warning. No manual review is required, and in most cases, the warning disappears within 12 hours of the corrected feed submission.
Need Google Merchant Center Help?
Through our fully managed service, we proactively monitor feeds, websites, and structured data to identify issues early and keep Shopping campaigns running without interruption. Detect mismatches before they trigger disapprovals
Need help staying compliant and keeping your listings live? Let’s talk.
We’ll help you take control of your Merchant Center performance before errors impact your bottom line.
