Suspended for untrustworthy promotions

The wording of this one stings, because it sounds like an accusation of bad faith. In practice it is one of the most mechanical causes there is: a field in your product data says a promotion exists, and the page a shopper lands on does not honour it.

Almost nobody in this situation set out to run a misleading promotion. Something wrote the field.

What the policy actually requires

A promotion has to be available on the terms advertised, at the moment a shopper arrives, on the page the advert points to. Google reads your promotional fields as claims about what a shopper will get, and it checks them the same way it checks price and availability — by fetching the page.

Three things follow:

1. A sale price is a claim. A sale_price field that equals the regular price is advertising a discount that does not exist.
2. The claim has to be honoured at the landing page, not somewhere in the funnel. A discount applied only in the cart is not visible where the comparison is made.
3. Conditions have to be findable. A promotion that depends on a minimum order, a code, or a customer group has to say so where the offer is made.

What usually lies behind it

A sale price identical to the regular price

The most common by a wide margin. Plugins that write both fields unconditionally, exports that copy the regular price into the sale field when no discount is set, or a campaign that ended without the field being cleared.

High Feed check

A sale price equal to the regular price

The feed advertises a reduction, and the landing page shows the same amount. To an automated comparison that is a promotion that cannot be honoured, regardless of intent.

Evidence

price

299.00

sale price

299.00

page

299.00, no reduction shown

Nothing here is dishonest. The sale field simply should not have been written at all.

Illustrative — constructed to show the shape of the fault. The numbers are not from a measured run.

A campaign that ended in one system and not the other

The shop stops showing the discount; the feed keeps carrying it until the next export, or the export runs from a cached price table. The window between the two is exactly the window in which a review can happen.

A discount that only exists in the cart

Common with volume rules, customer-group pricing and automatic basket discounts. It is a real promotion and a real saving. It is simply not present on the page Google fetches, which is where the check is made.

Conditions stated somewhere other than the offer

“Free shipping” on the product page, minimum order value on the shipping page. Both true, and the shopper who clicks the advert has not read the second one.

A promotional feed that outlives its campaign

Separate promotion feeds are easy to set up and easy to forget. The same auto-update pattern applies as with product feeds: deleting the file does not stop the job that regenerates it.

What the free Quick Scan can see of this

Measurable from outside, without any access:

• Sale prices in a publicly served feed that equal the regular price on the same row.
• Whether the landing page shows a reduction at all, in its structured data.
• Whether the feed price and the page price agree, and whether the difference is scattered or systematic.
• Promotional language in product and category names that makes a claim the page does not support.
• Whether more than one feed file is served publicly.

Not measurable from outside:

• Your Merchant Center promotions, which are configured inside the account and are frequently the actual subject of this notice.
• Whether a promotion was live at the moment a reviewer looked.
• Cart-level and customer-group pricing. We never fetch cart or checkout pages; a request there can create an order.
• Prior-price history, which is what an Omnibus assessment would need. We can show what is displayed today, not what was charged in the weeks before.

That last one matters: a meaningful share of this notice’s real causes sit in the second list. If the Quick Scan suggests yours does, we will say so rather than sell you a measurement of the part we can reach.

How to narrow it down yourself

1. Export your feed and filter for rows where sale price equals price. If the count is not zero, you have found a cause.
2. Open five of those rows’ landing pages, logged out. Confirm whether a reduction is actually shown.
3. List your active promotions in Merchant Center and compare their end dates against today. This step is yours.
4. Check whether any promotional feed is still being generated by a job you forgot about.
5. Clear the fields, regenerate once, and re-measure — logged out, after a cache purge.

What we do

We report every row where the promotional fields make a claim the page does not support, with both values quoted and the clause they breach. Where the cause is a plugin writing a field unconditionally, the recipe card names the setting. Where the cause sits inside your account, it goes into the checklist we hand back — marked as unverified by us, because we did not measure it.