Google Merchant Center disallows promotional overlays on product images — text, logos, watermarks and calls to action. A "20% off" starburst baked into a product photo can get that product disapproved, which stops it serving Shopping ads and removes it from free listings. The way around it is not a cleverer badge; it is keeping the badge out of the file, so the image your storefront shows and the image your feed submits are not the same thing.
What the policy actually prohibits
Merchant Center's image requirements are about the main product image representing the product accurately and nothing else. In practice the things that get flagged are:
- Promotional text. "Sale", "20% off", "Free shipping", "Best seller".
- Calls to action. "Buy now", "Shop today", anything instructing the viewer.
- Watermarks and logos placed over the product, including your own.
- Borders, frames and decorative graphics that are not part of the product.
- Placeholder or generic imagery standing in for the actual item.
The underlying logic is consistent: Google is assembling a grid of products from thousands of merchants, and a grid where some sellers shout is a worse grid. The rule is about comparability, not about taste.
Note that this applies to the main image. Additional images have more latitude, but the main one is the one that appears in results and the one that gets a product disapproved.
What a disapproval actually costs
This is worth being concrete about, because "disapproved" sounds procedural and is not.
A disapproved product stops serving in Shopping ads immediately and drops out of free listings. If you are running Performance Max, the item leaves the feed the campaign draws on, which quietly changes what the campaign spends on without any campaign setting having changed.
The awkward part is the detection lag. Merchant Center reviews items on its own schedule, so a badge added on Friday might be flagged the following week — long enough that nobody connects the disapproval to the promotion. Stores often find a batch of disapprovals and start debugging the feed, when the cause was an image edit.
And the recovery is not instant either. Fix the image, and the item has to be re-crawled and re-reviewed before it serves again.
The two-surface principle
The fix is simple once stated: your storefront and your feed do not have to show the same image.
That is not a loophole. It is how the two surfaces are meant to differ. Google wants a clean, comparable product shot. Your storefront wants to communicate a promotion to someone already on your site. Both are reasonable, and they are only in conflict if you collapse them into one file.
Editing the original collapses them. A display-layer overlay keeps them apart with no feed configuration at all, because the feed reads the stored file and never sees the overlay. Nothing in the export has to be excluded or rewritten — the clean image is simply what is there.
How this usually goes wrong
Three patterns, all recoverable but all avoidable:
- A seasonal edit nobody reversed. Badges added for a sale, the sale ends, the files stay. Disapprovals continue long after the promotion that caused them.
- A bulk image tool run across the catalogue. Fast, thorough, and it puts the whole feed at risk at once rather than a few products.
- A supplier's images arriving pre-badged. Dropshipped and distributor catalogues often ship photos with promotional text already in them. You did not add the overlay, and it is still your disapproval.
That third one catches people, because nothing in your own process went wrong. If you import supplier imagery, it is worth spot-checking what arrives before it reaches the feed.
Checking whether you already have a problem
Before your next promotion, four checks:
- Merchant Center → Diagnostics. Filter by disapproved items and read the reasons. Image policy violations are named explicitly.
- Open five product images from your feed, not from your storefront, and look at them. If a badge is visible, it is in the file.
- Check your best sellers specifically. A disapproval there costs more than one in the long tail, and they are the products most likely to have been promoted.
- Look at supplier-supplied images if you import any.
If you find baked-in badges, the fix is to restore the clean file — which is only possible if you kept one. Where you did not, re-photographing or re-requesting from the supplier is the honest answer, and it is a good argument for never editing originals again.
The same rule applies on the other channels
Merchant Center gets the attention because Shopping is usually the biggest feed, but almost every product feed channel has a version of this policy, and they are fed from the same Shopify images.
- Meta (Facebook and Instagram Shops). Commerce policies disallow promotional text and calls to action on product images. A rejection here also affects catalogue ads, which is often where the spend is.
- Pinterest. Product pins are expected to show the product without promotional overlay.
- Microsoft Shopping. Its image requirements broadly mirror Google's.
- Marketplaces. Amazon is stricter still — the main image must be the product on pure white, with no text, logos or graphics at all.
The point is not to learn four policies. It is that keeping the stored file clean satisfies all of them at once, and editing it puts every channel at risk simultaneously. One decision, made once, covers the lot.
It also means a disapproval can surface on a channel you were not watching. Stores sometimes find Meta catalogue rejections weeks before they notice the same items in Merchant Center, or the reverse.
What you can still do on the storefront
Everything. That is the point of separating the surfaces.
Sale badges, "only 3 left" warnings, trust marks, free-shipping flags — all fine on your own site, where you are not competing in someone else's grid. Nothing about Merchant Center's rules constrains what your shoppers see.
The constraint is narrow and specific: the file you submit to the feed must be a clean product image. Meet that, and the rest is yours. Adding sale badges the safe way covers the storefront half.
A note on additional images
The policy bites hardest on the main image, and the additional images in a Merchant Center listing have more room. That is where lifestyle shots, size guides and detail crops belong.
It is not unlimited room — additional images still have to show the product and still cannot be misleading — but a size chart or an in-use photo that would be wrong as a main image is fine as a supporting one.
Which gives a useful structure for a feed-connected catalogue: main image clean and comparable, additional images doing the work. It also means that if you want a marked image in the feed at all, an additional slot is the place to argue for it rather than the main one.
Watermarks are the same problem
Merchants often assume image protection is exempt because a watermark is not promotional. It is not exempt — a logo or name placed over the product image falls under the same rule.
Which creates a genuine tension for stores that want both feed compliance and some protection against image reuse. The workable split is to keep the main image clean for the feed and apply protection at the display layer or to secondary images, accepting that the photo most likely to be scraped is the one that has to stay unmarked. Image protection goes into what that trade actually buys you.
Where to go next
If you run a Shopping feed, treat "never edit the original" as a rule rather than a preference — it removes an entire category of disapproval from your store permanently.
With Watermark overlays are applied at the display layer, so the stored file stays feed-clean by construction. The wider picture is in the guide to watermarking Shopify product images.
