Recurring Google Merchant Center “Product page unavailable” issue: manual recrawl fixes it, then it slowly comes back

Technical Q&A
1

We’re trying to find anyone with direct experience troubleshooting recurring “product page unavailable” issues in Google Merchant Center / Google Ads for a Shopify store.

Here’s what we’re seeing: products gradually get flagged as unavailable in Merchant Center, sometimes in large batches. When we manually trigger Google to recrawl / re-review the affected items, the issue clears almost immediately. Then over time, the same products slowly drift back into the unavailable state again. The strange part is that the issue is not constant — it seems intermittent.

We’ve already done a lot of testing:

  • tested exact product URLs with both normal browser requests and AdsBot-Google

  • confirmed the product pages return 200 status codes

  • confirmed there are no redirect issues on the tested URLs

  • checked structured data / rich results, which generally look valid

  • reviewed product variant URLs and matching price / availability

  • investigated app / theme issues, feed sources, and possible conflicts in Merchant Center

At this point, our main theories are around:

  • Merchant Center source/feed conflicts

  • variant-specific product page interpretation

  • intermittent Google crawl/read behavior

  • possibly some kind of mismatch between what Google sees over time vs what we see when testing manually

  • Or could it be site speed?

A big clue is that manual recrawl fixes the issue right away, which makes this feel less like a permanently broken product page and more like an unstable or inconsistent crawl/classification problem.

If anyone has dealt with this exact pattern, especially on Shopify + Google Ads / Merchant Center, where products keep going into “product page unavailable” and then recover after recrawl. I’d really appreciate hearing:

  • what the actual root cause turned out to be

  • whether feed/source conflicts were involved

  • whether apps or theme behavior played a role

  • and what finally stopped the issue from recurring

Thanks in advance — looking specifically for people who’ve had hands-on experience with recurring Merchant Center product page unavailable issues, not just general Google Shopping setup advice.

2

Also seeing similiar problems, are you also directing users to variant urls? I’m seeing that as the outlier at the moment with what products are the issues.

3

Hey Steig.

We do have variants in the urls. The issue has settled down for us dramatically. I am unsure what the true fix was, but it was a combination of reaching out to Shopify support to re-index our website, turning off some webpixels, and general code clean up.

We are hoping things remain somewhat stable.

4

Here is a video I made about it, it’s a known issue for 2 weeks now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGjgpK9Eit0

5

it got worse on one of our client merchants’. More than 75% of the products are failing for the last three checks.

6

I reached out to shopify support about this and they mentioned they have seen more reports about it in the past month and will get back to me. will keep this thread updated.

7

does your merchant use o2o with cloudflare at all?

8

If I remember properly, the main problem with fixing it with Cloudflare is that bigger part of traffic comes through *.myshopify.com addresses which you can’t control.

9

Bumping this thread

My shop has been struffling with this for months too. Shopify devs and leadership need to stop vibe-coding these rediculous daily Admin UI changes and focus on real issues like this.

From what I’ve been able to find, it looks like this issue is related to shopify ratelimiting googlebot for some reason. This Reddit thread has been somewhat helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/shopify/comments/1swddem/shopify_setting_rate_limit_on_googlebot/

Shopify needed to fix this issue months ago. So far all attempts to get this resolved has just resulted in us going in circles with support. It’s beyond infuriating.

10

Was good for a bit and today it jumped from 0 to 400. No idea why.

11

Since manual recrawl fixes it temporarily and then the issue returns, I would separate this from a normal “broken URL” case and check it as an intermittent crawl / URL consistency problem.

The first things I would compare are:

1. Whether the submitted URL, canonical URL, and final redirected URL are always identical for the affected products.

2. Whether the page sometimes renders a different state for Googlebot, mobile, or non-logged-in visitors.

3. Whether variant URLs, unavailable-product behavior, geolocation, apps, pixels, cache rules, or theme scripts can temporarily show a page state that looks unavailable.

If you can share a few masked product URLs plus the exact Merchant Center error wording, it may be possible to narrow the layer down before changing anything in the store. I would avoid posting admin screenshots, account info, order data, or customer data.