What Should I Fix First When Merchant API Migration Makes My Products Hard for AI Assistants to Find?
When a Merchant API migration makes your products hard for AI assistants to find, first confirm which assistants actually lost you. Google's shopping experiences, including AI Mode's product results, depend on your Merchant Center data. ChatGPT's product carousels also draw heavily on Google Shopping, while Perplexity relies on its own product data and your website. If Google surfaces dropped, alone or with ChatGPT's carousels, the migration is the likely cause. Then fix what stops products being eligible at all. Check that every product sits in a correctly configured data source, with the right countries, language and linked supplemental sources. Check that prices use the new micros format, old-integration duplicates are gone and no attributes were lost in mapping. Finally, compare the processed products Google holds with what you submitted.
Is the migration really the cause?
Google sunset the Content API for Shopping on 18 August 2026, and requests to it have failed progressively since 1 September, so many stores migrated to the Merchant API in the months before, often alongside other changes. Before fixing anything, check where visibility fell:
| What dropped | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| Google Shopping, free listings and AI Mode product results only | Merchant Center data, probably the migration |
| ChatGPT shopping answers, together with Google | Possibly the migration, since ChatGPT's carousels draw on Google Shopping |
| Perplexity shopping answers only | Its product data or your site, not the Google migration |
| Everything, including organic search | Site changes such as a replatform, redirects or blocked crawling |
| Some countries only | Country or language targeting in your data sources |
Check the dates. If the drop lines up with the day the new integration went live, you have your starting point. If you use one feed platform to produce both Google and OpenAI feeds, a mapping error in that pipeline can hit both, which can look like a wider problem than it is.
What should you fix first?
Work down this list in order. Each item can remove products entirely, and the later items matter less if the earlier ones fail.
| Priority | Problem | Symptom | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Products not in a correctly set up data source | Fewer products in Merchant Center than in your catalogue; API calls failing | Create or correct the API primary data source; the Merchant API expects one before products are uploaded |
| 2 | Wrong countries or language | Products eligible in fewer markets than before | Check each data source's country and language settings against where you sell |
| 3 | Supplemental data not linked | Attributes that came from supplemental feeds, such as identifiers or custom labels, are missing | Link each supplemental data source to its primary; Google's guide says this link is required after creating a supplemental source |
| 4 | Price format | Prices rejected or wildly wrong | The Merchant API stores amounts in micros, with a separate currency code; check the conversion |
| 5 | Duplicates | Old and new versions of the same product with conflicting data | Remove products left from the old integration |
| 6 | Lost or mis-mapped attributes | Disapprovals for missing identifiers, availability or condition | Map every attribute to the product data specification; compare inputs with processed products |
| 7 | Local and regional inventory not migrated | In-store availability missing | Set up local and regional inventory data sources |
| 8 | Promotions and reviews not migrated | Offers and ratings no longer shown | Set up promotion and review data sources |
| 9 | No monitoring | Problems found weeks late | Turn on the Merchant API's change notifications and add count checks |
How do you check what Google actually ended up with?
The Merchant API separates what you send from what Google uses. A product input is the raw data you submit to a data source. A product is the processed result: one primary input plus any supplemental inputs, after feed rules and processing. Most migration bugs show up as a gap between the two.
- Reconcile counts. Compare your catalogue, the product inputs submitted and the processed products, by country. Any gap is a list of products to investigate.
- Read product statuses for each destination and country, and group the issues by type. One mapping bug often explains hundreds of disapprovals.
- Spot-check 20 products across categories. Compare the processed price, availability, identifiers, images and title with the live product page.
- Check the landing pages. Merchant Center's automatic item updates can use the structured data on your product pages to correct occasional price and availability mismatches. Google says frequent changes should be sent through the Merchant API instead. Keep page markup accurate as a safety net.
How does this affect AI assistants specifically?
Google's product experiences draw on the product data merchants submit, along with information from the web. If your products are missing or disapproved in Merchant Center, they lose that route into Google's shopping results, including product results in AI Mode. Your pages may still be mentioned in AI Overviews that cite ordinary web pages, which is why visibility can look patchy rather than zero.
Other assistants can be affected too. ChatGPT's product carousels draw heavily on Google Shopping results (83% of carousel products in one Search Engine Land analysis of Peec AI data), so products that drop out of Google Shopping can drop out of ChatGPT as well. OpenAI accepts product feeds from merchants who apply, and it accepts Google-compatible feed formats. A broken export feeding both can fail in both places. How product data should be structured more generally is covered in how Magento stores can fix product schema and technical foundations for AI visibility.
How long does recovery take?
Once the data is fixed, processed products and statuses usually update as Google reprocesses the data, often within days. Visibility in shopping and AI results then follows as products become eligible again. Track your recovery with the same counts and spot checks, and rerun a set of product questions in AI Mode and other assistants each week until results return to their earlier level.
How do you avoid this next time?
- Run old and new integrations in parallel on a subset of products before switching everything.
- Reconcile counts daily during and after any change to your product data pipeline.
- Alert on disapproval spikes and sudden drops in approved products.
- Keep a written attribute map from your catalogue to the product data specification, and review it when either side changes.
- Separate migrations from other changes. A replatform, new feed tool and new API in the same month make causes impossible to untangle.
What might an illustrative case look like?
Consider an illustrative outdoor gear retailer that moved to the Merchant API a week before the deadline. Two weeks later, AI Mode stopped showing its tents, and Shopping clicks fell by 40%. Counts showed 9,800 product inputs but only 6,100 approved products. Grouping the issues revealed two bugs. The supplemental data source carrying GTINs had never been linked to the primary, so thousands of products were disapproved for missing identifiers. Sale prices had been converted to micros twice. After linking the source and fixing the conversion, approved products returned to 9,700 within four days, and the retailer's tents reappeared in AI Mode results the following week.
What do people ask about Merchant API migration and AI visibility?
Can we go back to the Content API while we fix things?
No. It was sunset on 18 August 2026, and requests have failed progressively since 1 September. Fix forward in the Merchant API.
Will our product pages still appear in AI answers while Merchant Center is broken?
Some may, through ordinary web results. Product listings with prices and availability depend on your Merchant Center data.
Should we pause other product changes during recovery?
Yes. Freeze catalogue and feed changes until counts reconcile, so you can see the effect of each fix.
Published by The Kovmere Team · updated Sep 29, 2026 · More resources