Google Merchant Center not fetching your feed try this first

A scheduled fetch that silently stops is one of the most annoying failure modes in Merchant Center. Revenue drops, no email, no red banner. Here is the order to check, and if you are still setting things up, start from the Google Shopping feed guide instead.

1. Confirm the schedule is still on

Data sources, click your feed, look at the Fetch schedule section. If Frequency reads Do not fetch, someone (or a bulk edit) disabled it. Turn it back on and set a time when your server is idle.

2. Trigger a manual fetch

Same panel, Fetch now. Watch the result. A 200 with 0 items means an empty feed. A 4xx means the URL is wrong or requires auth. A 5xx means your server crashed. Each has a distinct fix.

3. Open the URL in a browser

If it works in Chrome but not for Google, the problem is either a User-Agent block, a geo-block, or a Cloudflare rule flagging Googlebot. Whitelist Googlebot explicitly.

4. Check the size

Merchant Center rejects feed files larger than 4 GB uncompressed. If you are near the limit, split by category into multiple feeds, or move to a source that streams XML and gzip-encodes it. AiFeedOptimiser does both automatically.

5. Check for a Merchant Center Next migration

If your account was migrated to Merchant Center Next in the last week, some scheduled fetches lose their primary-source link and stop silently. Recreate the schedule from the new UI, it takes 30 seconds and fixes it. Merchants on Shopify and WooCommerce hit this most often because the original source was created by a channel app.

Still nothing

Open a diagnostic ticket in Merchant Center Help. Include the feed URL, the last successful fetch timestamp, and the exact wording of the current status. If your feed serves from AiFeedOptimiser, forward us the ticket, we can pull our access logs for the same window and confirm whether Google actually hit the URL.