Feed could not be fetched

What this error means

Your feed is set up as a scheduled fetch, where Merchant Center downloads the file from a URL on your server or feed tool. That download failed. No products were added, removed, or updated, and if fetches keep failing for 30 days, the previously uploaded products expire and drop offline as a group.

Why it happens

The fetch fails for one of a handful of access reasons. The URL is wrong or has changed, often after a feed tool regenerated its links. The URL redirects to a page instead of serving the file. The file sits behind a login and Merchant Center has no credentials, or the stored credentials expired. Your server or robots.txt blocks Google's fetcher, or a firewall rate-limits it. Or the file itself is the problem: an unsupported format, a compressed file over the size limit, or a generation job that produced an empty or half-written file at the moment Google fetched it.

How to fix it

1. Open the exact feed URL from the data source settings in a private browser window. You should get the raw file, not a login page, an error, or an HTML page.
2. If the file needs authentication, enter the username and password in the data source settings in Merchant Center, and re-enter them if they have rotated.
3. Check that the URL serves a supported format, and that any compression stays within Google's size limits.
4. Make sure your server, CDN, or robots.txt does not block Google's feed fetcher.
5. Schedule your feed generation to finish before Merchant Center's fetch time, so Google never downloads a file that is still being written.
6. Trigger a manual fetch in Merchant Center to confirm the fix instead of waiting for the next scheduled run.

Fixing it in your store

Feed URLs from plugins and feed tools are not always stable, and some regenerate their token when settings change. After any change to your feed setup, compare the tool's current URL against what Merchant Center has. If your feed is large, generate it as a static file on a schedule rather than building it live on request, since live generation is what times out when Google comes calling.

How long until it clears

As soon as one fetch succeeds, the feed processes normally again, so this is typically resolved within hours. Act quickly if the failures have been running for a while, because the 30-day expiry applies to the products from the last successful upload.