Your new image is being processed. If you had a previous image, your previous image will continue to appear on Google for up to 30 days.
On this page
- Reasons why the issue is happening
- How to fix the issue
- Fix your products in Merchant Center
- Next steps
Reasons why the issue is happening
We haven’t yet been able to successfully retrieve the image you have specified in your product data. View some common reasons for this below.
Your new image is being processed. Your previous image will continue to appear on Google for up to 30 days. If you recently updated other product details, check that this image still matches.
How to fix the issue
Determine which issue applies to your account:
The image crawl rate is too slow
It can take up to 30 days for a product image to be crawled and retrieved. You can potentially increase the crawl rate in Google Search Console or move your images to a faster server. It’s also possible that the images you submitted for these products are pending a crawl.
You recently submitted your products to Google
- Recently submitted items experience a natural fetching delay. To optimize this, ensure your servers aren't returning 500 errors, adjust your Google Search Console crawl rate, and pace large bulk image updates in batches (for example, 10% daily) for continuous crawling.
- Note: Items may remain approved and continue to serve legacy assets while the background fetch is still processing.
Your product images aren’t live yet, or you recently updated the images
- Make sure that the image URLs you submit in your data feed are live in your serving system and available for Google to crawl.
- A new image can take up to 6 weeks to appear in your ad or listing if the image URL remains unchanged.
- To allow the systems to identify the change and crawl the new image quickly (typically within 3 days, but can take up to 30 days), use a new image URL and update it in your product data whenever you change an image.
Your product images aren't supported
- Make sure your images are in one of the supported formats (JPEG (.jpg/.jpeg), WebP (.webp), PNG (.png), GIF (.gif), BMP (.bmp) and TIFF (.tif/.tiff)) and include the appropriate extensions for their file names.
- Make sure that your images meet the size requirements. Learn more about image size requirements.
- To successfully process an image, its associated URL must link to an image file rather than to a script.
Your product image URLs aren’t working correctly
- If your image URLs don't work, an image won't be displayed for your product in our listings.
- Check that all your image URLs are working correctly.
- Make sure that there are no spaces within your image URLs. Each space should be replaced with the characters
%20. Otherwise, the server will not be able to crawl your image and it will not appear in results.
Avoid:http://www.example.com/my picture.jpg
Use:http://www.example.com/my%20picture.jpg - An image link should link directly to the URL of that image. If the image link in your data feed redirects to another URL, the server won't be able to grab a copy of your image to use when showing your product.
- The image URLs that redirect through ASP, PHP, or ColdFusion scripts will also fail to be fetched.
Your product images have HTTP headers
- If the header information for an image is different from the expected, the image processor will not be able to cache a copy of your image. Typically, headers are only an issue for images that are dynamically generated.
- Two header fields that must be passed are content-type and content-length:
- Content-type describes the file type you're sending. Two common values for images are
image/gifandimage/jpeg. - Content-length gives information about the file size for an image.
- Content-type describes the file type you're sending. Two common values for images are
- If you choose to add header fields, make sure they're appropriate for the image. Don't select "cache-control".
A robots.txt file on your server is blocking access
- A robots.txt file on your server prevents Google from crawling the images on your site. For the server to access these images, modify your robots.txt file to allow both user-agents "Googlebot" and "Googlebot-Image" to crawl your site. Learn more about the robots.txt.
- Enable Google to crawl your site by adding the following lines to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Fix your products in Merchant Center
If your issue requires changes to a product (or multiple products), follow the instructions below:
Fix products one by one directly in Merchant Center
- Go to Products under “Products & store” and then select the Needs attention tab.
- Use the filter icon
above the table to find all products affected by your issue.
- Select the title of the product you want to fix, then select Edit product.
- Determine which issue applies to your account, and then make the necessary changes.
- Select Save.
Fix multiple products at once
- Go to Products under “Products & store” and then select the Needs attention tab.
- Use the filter icon
- Select the Download icon
to download a list (.csv) of all affected products for all issues or this particular issue.
- Cross reference the downloaded list with your uploaded product data, determine which issue(s) apply to your account, and then make the necessary changes.
- Reupload your corrected product data to Merchant Center using your chosen upload method.
Next steps
After making the requested changes, check that you’ve fixed the issue by making sure the issue is no longer listed on the “Needs attention” page.
Keep in mind: While we typically recrawl new images within 3 days (72 hours), the image may remain in a pending state during processing. As a result, it can take up to 30 days for the issue to be fully resolved and disappear from the “Needs attention” page.