How Often Do You Have to Refresh Your Product Feed in Google Merchant Center?

Google Merchant Center requires every product in your feed to be resubmitted, or otherwise refreshed, at least once every 30 days. Any item that goes 30 days without a refresh automatically expires and drops out of Shopping ads and free listings, regardless of whether the product is still in stock or for sale.

What Counts as a Refresh

A refresh happens whenever you resubmit your feed, whether through a scheduled fetch, a manual upload, or the Content API. Google also refreshes product data automatically for sites it can crawl, where schema.org structured data on the product landing page lets Google re-validate the listing without a new feed submission. Merchants who rely only on Google's own crawling rather than scheduled feed uploads should confirm their structured markup is actually being picked up, since a crawl failure counts the same as never refreshing at all.

Recommended Upload Frequency vs. the Hard Limit

• Hard requirement — a full feed resubmission at least once every 30 days, or every item in it expires.
• Recommended cadence — submitting on a daily or near-daily schedule for most catalogs, so pricing, availability and stock status stay current between the mandatory 30-day refresh.
• High-frequency option — Google allows a full feed to be uploaded up to 4 times per day for merchants whose inventory or pricing changes often enough to justify it.

The Warning Before Expiration

Merchant Center surfaces an "Expiring items" warning in the diagnostics dashboard before products actually drop out, flagging listings that are approaching their 30-day limit without a refresh. Catching that warning early is the difference between a quiet feed-schedule fix and a sudden, unexplained drop in Shopping ads impressions once previously-live products silently expire.

Why This Trips Up Shopify and Platform-Connected Stores

Stores that connect Merchant Center through a platform app rather than a manually scheduled feed sometimes assume the integration keeps products perpetually current. In practice, an app that stops syncing correctly — due to a disconnected account, an expired API token, or a plan change — can leave a feed stale well past 30 days before anyone notices the Shopping ads have gone quiet, since there's no separate alert outside the Merchant Center diagnostics page itself.

Partial Feed Updates Don't Reset the 30-Day Clock for Every Item

Submitting a partial feed, or updating only a subset of products through the Content API, refreshes the clock only for the items actually included in that submission. Products that weren't touched by a partial update keep counting down from their last full refresh, so a merchant who assumes any feed activity resets the whole catalog's 30-day window can still lose untouched listings on schedule.

Bottom Line

Schedule an automated feed fetch at an interval well inside the 30-day limit — daily is standard — and check the Merchant Center diagnostics page periodically for expiring-items warnings rather than assuming a platform integration is refreshing data on its own.

Source: Google Merchant Center Help, "About expiration dates" (support.google.com/merchants/answer/188490), via feed-management documentation summarized at FeedArmy (feedarmy.com/kb/google-merchant-center-products-expiring-using-shopify-solution) and AdNabu (blog.adnabu.com/google-merchant-center/expiring-items-google-merchant-center).