DisapprovalCrawlability (robots.txt)

Fix "Unable to check product pages" (robots.txt crawl block) on Shopify

The error

Unable to check product pages

What it means

Google could not crawl your landing page (or its image) to run its quality and policy checks. This issue fires when robots.txt forbids Google's crawler, or when the page returns an HTTP error on crawl. Affected products are disapproved and stay disapproved until Google can successfully crawl them. Note there is a separate mobile-specific variant that suppresses products only on mobile devices.

Why it happens on Shopify

Shopify serves a sensible default robots.txt, so a robots-based block almost always means something changed it: a customized robots.txt.liquid template, a still-active store password, or an app (SEO, bot-protection, or rate-limiting) that blocks Googlebot or Googlebot-Image. A blanket Disallow, or a rule that blocks the image CDN, stops Google from reading the page or the product photo.

How to fix it

  1. Open https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt and confirm it does not Disallow your product or collection paths for Googlebot, and does not block Googlebot-Image.
  2. If you edit robots.txt.liquid, allow both the Googlebot and Googlebot-Image user agents to reach /products/ and your image URLs; remove any catch-all Disallow rules added by apps.
  3. Remove the store password (Online Store, Preferences) if the store is live, since a password page blocks all crawling.
  4. Test the product URL with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console (select Smartphone for the mobile variant) to confirm Google can fetch it, then request a review in Merchant Center.
  5. Allow a couple of days for Google to re-crawl and clear the disapproval after a fresh feed upload or sync.

Distinct from a broken-image disapproval: this issue is about Google being unable to crawl the page (robots.txt block or HTTP error), not a missing or unreadable image file. A mobile-only variant (answer/12467555) disables products only on mobile.

Check your store for this issue

Paste a product URL to see whether it has this problem — and what else might be putting your Google Shopping listings at risk.

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