Fixing “Mismatch: availability” between your feed and landing page

What Google is actually complaining about

Google crawls your landing page and compares what it finds against the availability value in your feed. Disagreement gets the item disapproved — and because Google trusts the page over the feed, a stale feed is always the thing that loses.

Only four values are valid: in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder, backorder. Anything else — In Stock, available, TRUE, yes, 1 — is invalid. The values are lowercase with underscores.

The mismatch itself usually means:

• Your feed regenerates daily but stock moves hourly, so it's stale by design.
• The page renders stock status in JavaScript that the crawler doesn't execute.
• An "Add to cart" button stays visible on a sold-out product, so the page reads as in-stock.
• Regional stock differs from what the crawler sees from its location.

How to fix it

1. Normalise every value to one of the four exact lowercase strings.
2. Increase feed fetch frequency, or push stock changes with the Content API instead of a scheduled file.
3. Make stock status visible in the server-rendered HTML, not injected by JS after load.
4. Hide or disable the buy button on out-of-stock items so the page is unambiguous.
5. For pre-orders, use preorder and set availability_date.

What a correct row looks like

id,title,availability,availability_date,price
SKU-4471,Cast Iron Skillet 10in,in_stock,,49.99 USD
SKU-4480,Winter Boot 2026,preorder,2026-10-01T00:00:00Z,140.00 USD

How long until the disapproval clears

Merchant Center re-crawls a scheduled feed on its normal cadence, so a fix can sit invisible for up to 24 hours. To force it: Products → Feeds → your feed → Fetch now, then re-check Diagnostics the following day. Items usually flip back to Active within one or two crawls once the attribute validates.

Other common disapproval causes