Merchant Center: Remove Found by Google products

Google has published new options in Merchant Center that let retailers remove products and prevent items labeled "Found by Google" from appearing in the product overview. These entries do not come from the official product data feed; they are detected when Google crawls the store website. For online merchants, this is an important extension of control over visibility in Google Shopping, free listings, and related campaign formats.

Until now, Merchant Center users could maintain feeds and edit individual items manually, but Google's automatic product discovery ran in parallel in the background. When the crawler finds product pages with valid structured data markup or clear commerce signals, Google can assign those items to the account regardless of whether the merchant wants to promote them. The new functionality addresses the tension between technical discoverability and deliberate feed strategy.

What "Found by Google" means in Merchant Center

"Found by Google" refers to products Google discovered by crawling the website, not through an uploaded feed or Content API integration. Typically, the crawler identifies product URLs via Schema.org Product markup, Open Graph tags, price information, and cart functionality. Once Google classifies an item this way, it appears in the Merchant Center interface with the corresponding source label.

For many stores this is initially an advantage: items become visible in Shopping surfaces faster, even when the feed is still incomplete or individual SKUs are missing. At the same time, problems arise when outdated variants, test products, B2B items without consumer pricing, or pages with inconsistent data are added automatically. Without clear control, feed and crawl sources mix together, which complicates reporting, bidding, and quality reviews.

Why merchants remove crawl products deliberately

The motivation to delete "Found by Google" entries is rarely purely negative. Merchants mainly want consistency between the shop frontend, inventory, and Merchant data. A crawl-detected product can appear in Google Shopping even though it was deliberately excluded from the feed, for example because of low margin, supply constraints, or regional restrictions. Duplicates also arise easily when the same SKU is served via feed and crawl with slightly different titles or images.

Impact on feed quality and campaigns

Google evaluates Merchant Center accounts by data quality, policy compliance, and performance. Products with incorrect prices, wrong availability, or misleading landing pages can trigger warnings and suspensions regardless of source. If crawl items deliver worse data than the curated feed, the entire account suffers. Performance Max and Shopping campaigns draw on the product catalog; unwanted crawl entries tie budget to items that are not strategically prioritized.

New Google tools to remove and prevent

With the announced updates, merchants receive systematic tools to remove existing "Found by Google" products and block future automatic inclusion. In the Merchant Center product overview, entries can be filtered by source, selected, and removed from the active catalog. They then disappear from Shopping and free listing surfaces, provided no parallel feed source reintroduces the same SKU.

Google also offers prevention options at account level: merchants can specify that Google should no longer add new products to the account via website crawling. This setting is especially relevant for brands with tightly controlled assortments, marketplace models with changing third-party items, or shops with frequent test environments on publicly reachable URLs.

Practical steps for store operators

Teams should first inventory Merchant Center and compare all products with source "Found by Google" against the primary feed. Items that should remain absent are removed. Merchants then enable the prevention feature if they want visibility driven exclusively by the feed going forward. In parallel, a technical review helps: which product URLs are accessible to crawlers, what structured data markup is present, and are there noindex or canonical signals Google might misread?

Prevention through shop structure and technical SEO

Merchants who want to avoid crawl products long term combine Merchant Center settings with technical measures. Test and staging URLs should sit behind authentication or be blocked via robots.txt for product paths. On live product pages, price, availability, and identifiers such as GTIN should match the feed. Misleading Product markup on category pages or blog posts can lead Google to treat non-product URLs as items.

For SEO teams, the development is a signal: Google actively uses website crawling as a complement to the feed. Clean internal linking, correct canonicals, and valid schema remain important, but merchants can now decide more strongly which discovered items enter the Merchant catalog. That moves collaboration between e-commerce, paid media, and technical SEO closer together.

• Filter the Merchant Center product overview by source "Found by Google" and review.
• Remove unwanted crawl items and clean up duplicates against the feed.
• Enable the prevention option when only feed products should be visible.
• Audit structured data and robots.txt on product URLs regularly.
• Resync feed, inventory, and Shopping campaigns after cleanup.

The new Merchant Center tools give merchants more control over the product catalog Google uses for Shopping and related formats. Merchants who deliberately separate feed strategy from crawl results reduce data errors and allocate ad budgets more precisely to the items they actually intend to sell.