Found by Google: Why Merchant Center Lists Products You Never Submitted, and How to Control Them

Google checks your site for product changes at least once every 24 hours, according to Merchant Center Help. If your store has product markup and a claimed website, that crawl can also create listings in Merchant Center that nobody on your team submitted. The first sign is usually a product count that does not match your feed, or a price in Shopping that matches your site but not your file.

This guide is for merchants and feed owners who see unexplained products, duplicates or mismatched values in Merchant Center. By the end you will be able to confirm whether the "Found by Google" source is responsible, decide whether to keep, restrict or switch it off, and fix the markup problems that make its listings wrong.

What "Found by Google" is, and what it is not

Merchant Center Help calls the feature "Add products automatically from your online store". Google scans your product pages, reads the structured data on them (title, price, availability) and sends that to your account. Products that arrive this way appear under a data source labelled "Found by Google". In the Merchant API the same capability is called the autofeed.

It is not the same thing as automatic item updates. That setting corrects price and availability on products you already submitted; we cover it in Stopping Google From Silently Overriding Your Feed's Price and Availability Data. "Found by Google" creates products from the crawl, whether or not you submitted anything.

Google's help page lists three conditions for it to work: structured data on the product pages with all required attributes, permission for Google to collect the information, and a website that you have verified and claimed in your Merchant Center account. If the option is missing from your account, the page says to check that the account is not suspended and that robots.txt does not block Googlebot.

Public detail on the rollout is thin. Search Engine Land reported it in June 2024 and noted that only some merchants saw the website option at first.

Step 1: Confirm the source in Merchant Center

Do this before changing anything. In Merchant Center, open Settings, then Data sources, then the Product sources tab, and look for a "Found by Google" entry. Google's help page gives this exact path.

If the entry exists, open it and note three things: the countries it covers, whether it is set to be managed, and how many products it holds. Compare that count with the number of rows in your submitted feed. The gap between the two is the first number you need.

If there is no "Found by Google" entry, stop here; your mismatch has another cause.

Step 2: Match the symptom to the cause

These are the patterns worth checking first, mapped to what Google documents. The "Likely cause" column is our reading of the documentation, not a statement from Google about your account.

The duplicate row deserves a note. Google's help page says that if you upload a product yourself and the same product is also found automatically, Merchant Center keeps your uploaded version and removes the automatic one. It does not say how the match is made. That is why identifier hygiene matters: if your feed id and your page SKU disagree, we cannot assume Google will pair them.

Step 3: Read the markup the way Google's crawler does

Crawled listings are only as good as the structured data they come from. Google's guidance for Merchant Center says the markup must be present in the HTML the server returns, and that JavaScript added after load does not count. It also says the markup must match what the shopper sees and recommends JSON-LD.

Here is a minimal set of properties that satisfies the required properties from Google's merchant listing documentation (name, image, and an offer with a price and currency). We added availability and condition because Google's Merchant Center guidance lists them alongside price and currency for automatic item updates.

• "@type": "Product"
• "name": "Merino Crew Neck Sweater, Navy, M"
• "image": "https://shop.example.com/img/sweater-navy-m.jpg"
• "sku": "SW-NAVY-M" and "gtin13": "8690000012345"
• "offers": {"@type": "Offer", "price": "1249.90", "priceCurrency": "TRY", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock", "itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition", "url": "https://shop.example.com/sweater-navy-m"}

All of this sits inside one JSON-LD script block of type application/ld+json, with "@context": "https://schema.org/". The values above are illustrative, not from a real store.

One failure worth checking on Turkish-locale storefronts is the price string. Google's guidance states that prices use a period as the decimal separator. A template that outputs "1.249,90" because the shop locale is tr-TR does not follow that rule. Your feed may be correct while the crawled listing is wrong or rejected.

Two more rules from the same documentation catch many stores. First, a landing page should carry a single offer; if it shows several, each needs a SKU or GTIN that matches the same attribute in your product data. Second, if the shopper pays a sale price, the sale price belongs in the markup. Products sold in several currencies need a separate URL for each currency.

Step 4: Decide what you want, then use the matching control

There are three reasonable outcomes. Pick one on purpose rather than leaving the default in place.

Keep it as a safety net

Leave the source on, fix the markup, and treat crawled products as a coverage check. This suits stores whose submitted feed is complete and whose platform produces clean markup. A 2023 vendor blog post noted that Shopify and BigCommerce include product markup by default, but that is one vendor's account and not a guarantee for your theme.

Restrict it

Google's help page describes several narrower controls. On the Data sources tab you can edit the countries, stop managing the products, disable ads for products found by Google, or hide all automatically found products. On the Products tab you can exclude individual items. Hiding can take up to 4 to 8 hours to take effect. If you hide everything through an attribute rule that sets the Pause attribute to "all", the products are archived after 14 days.

Opt out

Opting out stops Google adding new products automatically. Google warns that basic product information can still appear in organic Search results, and that opting out may reduce traffic. To keep pages out of Search entirely, the help page points to a noindex tag, and to the data-nosnippet attribute to prevent the crawl from collecting information.

Step 5: Check the setting programmatically

If you manage several accounts, the Merchant API exposes the setting. The accounts.autofeedSettings reference (last updated 2025-06-06 on the page we read) lists two fields. enableProducts is a required boolean that turns product crawling through the autofeed on or off, and it cannot be used on a marketplace account. eligible is output only and tells you whether the business qualifies for the autofeed, so read it before relying on enableProducts.

The documented methods are getAutofeedSettings and updateAutofeedSettings. Google notes that products usually appear right away on first enablement but can take up to 24 hours when you re-enable. A v1 version of the same resource also appears in Google's reference, so confirm which version your integration targets. If you are still on the old Content API, our write-up on migrating your feed pipeline to Merchant API covers that move.

A short audit you can run today

1. Open Settings, Data sources, Product sources and record whether "Found by Google" exists, which countries it covers and how many products it holds.
2. Export your submitted feed and compare the product count and the id column with the crawled items.
3. Open five products that appear only under "Found by Google" and compare price, availability and image with the page.
4. View the page source (not the rendered page) for one product and confirm the JSON-LD is in the server HTML.
5. Check that price uses a period as the decimal separator and that the currency code is a three-letter ISO 4217 code.
6. Check that each page has one offer, or that each offer's SKU or GTIN matches your feed.
7. Decide keep, restrict or opt out, apply it, and review campaign settings if ads were enabled for crawled products.

Product-count swings in your own feed are worth catching quickly, and our Feed Protection feature skips flawed entries or emails you when it sees them. Its page is explicit that it does not provide real-time monitoring, so treat it as a log and alert tool rather than a live watch. For channel-level setup, see our Google Merchant Center integration page.

Where this guide breaks down

We worked from Google's public documentation, not from your account, and Google's help page lists no revision dates, so we cannot say when any behaviour changed. The page names only title, price and availability as populated data points and points elsewhere for the rest. We do not know the full attribute set the crawl fills, or the exact key used to merge a crawled product with a submitted one.

We also have no first-party numbers on how often crawled listings are wrong. The same 2023 vendor post reported roughly 10% of items with errors for its own clients, but it describes no sample or method and the author sells a competing service, so we do not rely on it.

The fix for bad markup lives in your storefront theme or platform, and that is outside what a feed file can change. If your problem is mainly markup quality, a structured data plugin or your platform's own settings is the right tool, and a feed management product, ours included, will not replace it. Where the problem is mismatched identifiers or a feed that needs rules and enrichment, that is where feed tooling earns its place.

Frequently asked questions

Why are there products in Merchant Center that I never uploaded?

If your site has product markup and a claimed website, Google's crawl can add products under a "Found by Google" source. Check Settings, Data sources, Product sources to confirm. Google says it checks the site at least once every 24 hours.

Will a crawled product overwrite the one in my feed?

Google's help page says that when a product is both uploaded and found automatically, Merchant Center keeps the uploaded version and removes the automatic one. The page does not explain how the two are matched, so keep your feed id and your page SKU or GTIN consistent.

How do I stop Google adding products automatically?

Opt out of the website source in Merchant Center. Google notes this stops new automatic additions, but basic product information can still appear in organic Search results and traffic may fall.

How long does hiding crawled products take?

Google says hiding "Found by Google" products can take up to 4 to 8 hours. If you hide them with the Pause attribute set to "all", they are archived after 14 days.

Why was a crawled product disapproved when my feed is clean?

The disapproval relates to the crawled version, which is built from your page markup. Google also says its automated policy checks on these products may not be fully accurate. Open the item, read the reason and fix the landing page or markup.

Can crawled products appear in my Google Ads campaigns?

Yes, if you enable ads for them. Google warns that campaigns may then include additional products and locations, so review campaign scope after changing the source.

Check your feed against what Google sees

Crawled listings are easier to untangle when your submitted feed is clean and complete. Run your feed through the free product feed audit tool: paste the feed URL and it scores data completeness, data quality and technical health.