Fixing “Invalid image [image_link]” and image crawl failures
Why Merchant Center can't fetch your product images — robots.txt blocks, size limits, redirects and placeholder rules.
Check your own feed first. feedcheck scans your whole product
file in your browser and lists every row with this problem — plus the other
5 disapproval causes below. Nothing is uploaded.
Google fetches every image_link with its own crawler. The
attribute can look perfect and still fail:
robots.txt blocks the image path. The single most
common cause, and invisible from a browser because you aren't blocked.
Googlebot-Image must be allowed to fetch the CDN path.
Too small. Minimum 100×100px (250×250 for apparel).
Google recommends at least 800×800.
Too large — over 16MB or 64 megapixels.
Wrong format. Only JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF and
WebP. An SVG or an AVIF will be rejected.
Not HTTPS, or the URL redirects (Google often won't
follow it).
Promotional overlay. Watermarks, "SALE" badges,
borders and logos on the image are a policy violation, not a technical one.
A placeholder "image coming soon" graphic.
How to fix it
Fetch the URL the way Google does — from outside your network, logged out.
A 403 or a login redirect means the crawler sees the same.
Check your robots.txt doesn't disallow the image directory, and
that no firewall or bot-protection rule is blocking Googlebot-Image.
Serve HTTPS URLs that resolve directly, with no redirect chain.
Re-export anything under 250×250 at 800×800 or larger.
Strip watermarks and promo text; use a clean product shot on a plain
background.
Put extra angles in additional_image_link rather than stacking
them into one composite image.
What a correct row looks like
id,title,image_link,additional_image_link
SKU-4471,Cast Iron Skillet 10in,https://cdn.example.com/img/4471-main.jpg,https://cdn.example.com/img/4471-side.jpg
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.
Don't want to edit thousands of rows by hand?
FeedCheck Rescue — $29, one-off. Send your feed file and I
run the auto-fixer over it, then send back a corrected file plus a plain-English
changelog of every single edit, so you can see exactly what changed before you
upload it.