Available on the Awesome plan
Once your Product Ratings feed is approved by Google, it’s important to check the status of your reviews to ensure they’ve been processed correctly.
Status of your reviews
To see the status of your reviews:
From your Google Merchant Center Next admin, on the left menu, go to Reviews.
There, you’ll see a list of reviews from the Product Ratings and their processing statuses:
Ready to serve – Reviews that have been processed successfully and include all recommended identifiers
Needs review – Reviews that have been processed but may be missing values or suggested unique identifiers
Disapproved items – Reviews that are rejected and require correction or removal
You can open the reviews in that list to see their Review detail and Review issues.
Review issues
Reviews with an issue won’t be displayed in Google Shopping.
Fixing the issues listed in Review issues can change the status of a review from Needs review to Ready to serve, making it eligible to appear on Google Shopping.
To see the most important issues you need to fix:
From your Google Merchant Center Next admin, go to Reviews > View what needs attention.
There, you’ll see a summary the review statuses at the top, along with the issues and number of affected reviews at the bottom.
1. Missing or invalid product_id
Google states that ratings and reviews are matched to products based on a number of factors, the most important being globally unique product identifiers that appear in both:
the Product Ratings feed, and
the Products feed (in Google Merchant Center).
A review is marked as Missing or invalid product_id in Google Merchant Center if the required identifiers for that product are missing in either feeds. To fix this issue, you need to add a valid GTIN and Brand+MPN values to both your Products and Product Ratings feed.
Find the affected product: In your Google Merchant Center, open any affected review and identify which product it belongs to.
Check if the product has GTIN:
From your Judge.me admin, go to Settings > Product review groups.
Find the product you identifier earlier.
Scroll to the right and click the 3-dot icon (...).
Select View details.
Check if the Barcodes field has any values or is empty (shows as None).
If the Barcodes field has any values: check if it's included in the reviews feed:
From your Judge.me admin, go to Settings > Google and SEO.
Find Google Shopping and click Manage.
Scroll down to the Advanced settings section.
Enable "Add GTIN in the feed (Default)" (it should be enabled by default).
Click Save.
If the Barcodes field is empty but your product has an assigned GTIN: consider adding GTIN to Shopify as it's the most recommended product identifier by Google.
From your Shopify admin, go to Products.
Find and open the affected product.
Scroll down to the Inventory section.
In the Barcode (ISBN, UPC, GTIN, etc.) field, enter the assigned GTIN.
Click Save.
If the Barcodes field is empty and your product doesn't have an assigned GTIN: provide its Brand and MPN instead.
To add Brand and MPN in Shopify:
From your Shopify admin, go to Products.
Find and open the affected product.
Scroll down to the Inventory section and enter the MPN value in the SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) field.
On the right menu, scroll down to the Product organization section and enter the Brand name in the Vendor field.
Click Save.
We automatically include the Brand names in the product review feed if they are available.
To include MPN in the reviews feed:
From your Judge.me admin, go to Settings > Google and SEO.
Find Google Shopping and click Manage.
Scroll down to the Advanced settings section.
Enable "Add MPN in the feed".
Click Save.
2. Spam (marked by the publisher)
A review is marked as Spam (marked by the publisher) if they are marked as <is_spam>true</is_spam> in the Product Ratings feed.
If you're using the old Product Ratings feed (deprecated):
All hidden, archived, and pending reviews are marked as
<is_spam>true</is_spam>in the Product Ratings feed.If this is intended, you don't need to take any actions.
If you want these reviews to appear in Google Shopping, you can either:
Publish the reviews in your Judge.me admin. After publishing the reviews, the feed may take up to 24 hours to update.
Or you can upgrade to the new Product Ratings feed, which includes all reviews regardless of their status.
If you're using the new Product Ratings feed:
All reviews are automatically checked for profanity before being sent to Google.
If profanity is detected, the affected words in the review’s title or content are replaced with
****in the feed. When this happens, the review is also marked as<is_spam>true</is_spam>.This means a review can be marked as spam in the Product Ratings feed even if it appears normal in the Judge.me dashboard.
At this time, this behavior cannot be changed or edited.