Shopping and Performance Max went to zero overnight and there’s an email in your inbox with the word “Misrepresentation” in it.
Before you change a single thing on the site, find out which of two completely different events just happened. They produce an identical revenue chart and they have almost nothing else in common.
One is a batch of item level disapprovals. Your account is fine, your other products are still running, and you fix it in the feed without appealing anything. Often a morning’s work.
The other is an account level suspension, which switches off every item for that feed across Shopping ads and free listings at once, and can only be cleared by a review request. That one is measured in weeks, not hours, and the single most expensive mistake is rushing it.
Where to actually look
In Merchant Center Next, item level problems live under Products, then Needs attention, which ranks the issue cards by how much click potential they’re costing you. Account level problems, warnings and suspensions alike, show up separately on the Home page and in Diagnostics.
So check Home first. If there’s no account level banner there, you are not suspended, whatever the email implied, and you should be in the feed rather than writing an appeal.
That distinction sounds obvious. I’ve watched a store spend two days drafting a reinstatement letter for what was a GTIN mismatch on 340 products.
Misrepresentation is the one with no warning
Here’s the part that makes suspensions feel arbitrary, and it’s worth understanding before you decide how urgently to act.
For most Merchant Center policy violations, Google’s documentation says you get a warning at least seven days before any suspension takes effect. There’s a window. You can see it coming.
Misrepresentation does not work that way. Google’s policy pages describe suspension on detection for it, with no warning period and no notice.
Which means a store that has run cleanly for six years can be live on Monday and dark on Tuesday with no change to the feed, because what changed was an interpretation of something that was always there.
What Google is actually testing now
The misrepresentation policy was clarified in October 2025, with enforcement from the end of that month, and the shift is the thing most checklists still haven’t caught up with.
It stopped being about whether the pages exist and became about whether they work.
A returns policy page that links to a form which errors. A contact address nobody monitors. A physical address that doesn’t resolve to a real place. Under the old reading, you had the page, so you were compliant. Under the current one, an unusable process is the violation.
The other half is pricing. The price in your feed is now checked against what the buyer actually pays at checkout, and that includes handling fees, processing charges and mandatory add-ons that only appear at the last step. A $2.95 “service fee” you’ve charged for years is a feed-to-checkout discrepancy.
Go and test these yourself, as a stranger would:
- Open a product page and count the clicks to your returns policy. More than two is too many.
- Read the policy. Does it state a timeframe, who pays return shipping, and how a refund is issued? Vague is treated as absent.
- Submit your own returns form, from a personal email, and see whether anything comes back.
- Email your own support address and time the reply.
- Check your business name, address and phone are identical on the site, in Merchant Center, and on the card descriptor your customers see on their statement.
- Add a product to the cart and go all the way to the payment step. Compare the total against the feed price, line by line.
- Confirm every page in the purchase path is on a valid certificate, not just the checkout.
Most suspensions I’ve looked at came down to two or three items on that list, not a policy argument.
What a review request should contain
Fix everything first. All of it, live on the site, before you touch the button.
The request itself is short and dull on purpose. What was wrong, what you changed, the URL where the change can be seen, and the date it went live. One paragraph per item. No explanation of why you think the suspension was unfair, no history of your account, no mention of your revenue.
Do not argue the policy. Even when you’re right, the reviewer is checking a site against criteria, not adjudicating a dispute.
And do not request a review hoping it buys you time. A denied request triggers a seven day cool down with the review button disabled, so a premature attempt costs you a week you cannot get back. Reported review times run around three to seven business days, longer for complicated cases, and reinstatement is not automatic at the end of it. Google’s own wording is that accounts are reinstated in compelling circumstances, which is a fair description of the bar.
One prepared request beats three hopeful ones.
The Q4 version of this problem
Timing is the whole reason this is worth an hour today rather than in January.
A three week reinstatement in February is an irritation. The same three weeks starting in the second week of November takes out the only period of the year that matters for most stores, and no amount of thoroughness in the appeal buys back the days.
So two things for this quarter. Run the test list above now, while nothing is broken and you have the patience to do it properly.
Then stop touching the inputs that trigger re-review. Changing your legal business name, your payment descriptor, your checkout provider or your returns terms in the middle of Q4 is how a clean account gets looked at again. If one of those changes has to happen, do it in the first week of October or wait until January.
Before lunch
Thirty minutes, in this order.
Open Merchant Center Home and establish whether this is account level or item level. Write down which it is, because everything downstream depends on it.
If it’s item level, go to Products, then Needs attention, and work the high impact card first.
If it’s account level, do not open the appeal form yet. Work the seven test items above, fix what fails, get the fixes live, and only then write the request.
Either way, finish by adding the returns form test and the feed-to-checkout price comparison to whatever monthly checklist you already run. They are the two that break quietly. The organic side of a store has its own version of this problem, which I’ve written up as a Shopify SEO checklist.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on a suspension before you submit, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on paid performance cover the wider account. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.