Automatic improvements settings in Merchant Center
What Merchant Center's automatic item updates and automatic image improvements do, the trade-offs, and when a clean feed is the better answer than letting Google patch it.
Merchant Center can automatically correct your listings when it thinks your feed is wrong, fixing prices and availability from your website, and cleaning up images. It's a safety net that keeps stale feeds from getting disapproved. But it also changes what Google serves without changing your feed, so a merchant who controls their data cleanly is often better off switching parts of it off and fixing the source instead.
What "automatic improvements" covers
Automatic improvements are Merchant Center settings that let Google correct your listings on its own when it thinks your submitted data is wrong or weak. The two that matter most for advanced merchants:
- Automatic item updates: Google corrects price and availability in the served listing when its crawl of your product page disagrees with your feed. The goal is to avoid disapproving an item for a price or availability mismatch when the site is actually right.
- Automatic image improvements: Google cleans up images that would otherwise be disapproved: cropping out added promotional text or overlays, or replacing a problem image with a better one it can find.
There are related automatic behaviours (shipping and other conditional item updates in some markets), but item updates and image improvements are the two you'll actually decide about.
Crucially: none of these edit your feed. They change what Google serves on top of your data. Your source and your feed file stay exactly as submitted, which is the whole tension.
The trade-off, straight
| Automatic improvements ON | Automatic improvements OFF | |
|---|---|---|
| Stale/slow feed | Safety net, avoids mismatch disapprovals | Products get disapproved when feed lags site |
| Clean/fast feed | Masks drift you'd rather catch | Feed is authoritative; problems surface honestly |
| Visibility of issues | Hidden, served data differs from feed silently | Issues show up in Diagnostics where you can fix them |
| Who's the source of truth | Google's crawl of your site | Your feed |
The one-line version: automatic improvements optimise for listings staying live. A clean-feed operator optimises for the feed being the source of truth. Those goals pull in different directions.
Deep dive When to keep them, when to switch them off
The decision comes down to how much you trust and control your own feed. A framework:
Keep automatic item updates ON when:
- Your feed refreshes slowly (once a day or less) while your site changes prices and stock frequently. The updates bridge the gap and stop the mismatch disapprovals that would otherwise pile up.
- You don't have tight control over your feed pipeline and the site is genuinely the more current source.
- You'd rather stay live with a small silent discrepancy than lose listings while you fix refresh cadence.
Switch automatic item updates OFF when:
- Your feed is accurate and refreshes often enough that the site and feed rarely disagree. The updates then have almost nothing to correct except your own mistakes, and you'd rather see those mistakes in Diagnostics than have them papered over.
- You need the served price and availability to be exactly what you submitted (margin control, tROAS bidding that assumes the feed price, promotions that must line up). When Google serves a corrected price you didn't submit, downstream systems that trust the feed are now working off stale numbers. This matters directly for bid strategy: a bidding layer reasoning about product economics wants the served price to equal the fed price.
- You treat feed-vs-site consistency as a signal. If the feed and site disagree, that's a bug worth fixing at the source, not smoothing over. Turning updates off makes the disagreement visible.
Automatic image improvements are lower-stakes and safer to leave on for most merchants; they mainly rescue images that would otherwise be disapproved. Switch them off only if you need pixel-exact control over which image serves, or if the automatic crop has produced a worse result than your original.
The deeper point for anyone running a clean operation: every automatic layer widens the gap between your feed and what Google actually serves. Between supplemental overrides, feed rules, inferred site data (Merchant Center Next leans on this), and automatic corrections, the served catalog can be a blend nobody can fully reconstruct from the source. The advanced posture is to shrink that gap: make the feed accurate and current enough that Google has nothing to correct, then decide each automatic layer on purpose. A high Feed Health Score is largely the measure of not needing these safety nets: accurate prices, valid identifiers, compliant images submitted directly, so the served listing and the feed are the same thing.
Where to find and set them
The controls live in Merchant Center settings under automatic improvements (in Merchant Center Next, within the account settings area). Each behaviour (item updates, image improvements) can be toggled independently, so you can keep image cleanup on while making price and availability strictly feed-driven.
The clean-feed alternative
If your reason for wanting automatic item updates on is "my prices and stock drift out of sync", the durable fix is upstream, not in Google's safety net:
- Tighten feed refresh so the feed tracks the site closely, and the mismatch mostly disappears.
- Fix the actual discrepancies surfaced in Diagnostics rather than letting them be silently corrected.
- Make the feed authoritative, so every channel, not just Google, gets the same accurate price and availability.
Automatic improvements are a good backstop for a feed you can't fully control. For a feed you can control, they're mostly a sign of a source problem worth solving directly.
Frequently asked questions
What do automatic item updates actually change?
They correct price and availability in your served listings when Google's crawl of your website disagrees with your feed. If the feed says £40 and the page says £35, automatic updates can serve £35 so the listing isn't disapproved for a price mismatch, but your feed still says £40.
Should I turn automatic improvements off?
It depends on how good your feed is. If your feed is stale or refreshes slowly, they're a useful safety net. If your feed is accurate and refreshes often, they mostly hide problems you'd rather see and fix at the source, so many precise merchants disable item updates and keep the feed authoritative.
Do automatic improvements edit my feed?
No. They change what Google serves; your feed file and your source data are untouched. That's exactly why they can quietly mask a feed that's drifting out of sync with your site.