I fixed everything Google asked for and my Merchant Center is still suspended. What else do they want?

The rejection email that cites Misrepresentation again, in the same words as the first one, feels like a verdict on your work: nothing you did mattered. That reading is understandable and usually wrong.

Google's appeal responses are templates. "Misrepresentation" is not one specific problem - it is an umbrella category that covers dozens of distinct signals: missing business identity, feed-versus-website mismatches, policy page contradictions, thin or duplicated content, suspicious account history, payment profile inconsistencies and more. When any one of those signals still fires, the system returns the same category name it returned the first time. The email does not distinguish between "all fifteen original problems remain" and "fourteen are fixed and one remains". Both produce an identical message.

So the same rejection text is compatible with three very different realities:

• You fixed most of it, and one or two residual issues keep tripping the same category. This is the most common case we see when auditing stores whose owners "fixed everything".
• You fixed the website, but the trigger was never on the website. Account-level and identity-level factors, covered below, do not respond to website fixes at all.
• Your appeal was never meaningfully re-reviewed. Appeals that come back in minutes or hours were processed automatically, not read. If that matches your experience, see why appeals get rejected within hours.

Merchants fix what a human customer would notice: the visible policy pages, the contact page, the product descriptions, the prices. Google's systems check something different - a machine-readable, cross-referenced version of your store - and that is where "compliant to a human" and "compliant to the classifier" quietly diverge.

Common gaps we find in stores that were "fully fixed"

None of these show up when you proofread your own website, because your own website is genuinely fine to a human eye. They show up only when you audit the store the way the machine does: page by page, feed field by feed field, account setting by account setting. Our systematic version of that audit is described in how to fix a Merchant Center misrepresentation suspension.

Sometimes the website audit comes back genuinely clean - and the suspension still holds. That is because a significant share of Misrepresentation suspensions are not about the website at all. They are about the account, and no amount of website work will ever clear them.

Account history and linked accounts

Google evaluates trust at the level of the account graph, not the single account. If your Merchant Center sits under a multi-client account (MCA) that also contains an old suspended sub-account, or shares a payment profile, admin user, phone number, address or domain history with a previously suspended account, that association can keep your suspension alive indefinitely. A dead sibling account you forgot existed - an abandoned test account, a previous agency's setup, a store you closed two years ago - can quietly transfer its suspension to everything linked to it. The rejection template will never mention this. Checking the linked-account structure is one of the first things worth doing when a clean website keeps getting rejected.

Entity and identity mismatches

The legal entity behind the account has to line up everywhere Google can look: the business name in Merchant Center, the company named on your website, the payment profile, the domain registration, the VAT or company registry record. A store branded "SunGrid" operated by "Codershyve SRL" with a payment profile under a third name reads as an identity inconsistency even when every individual piece is legitimate. Verification of these details against public registries is routine, and a mismatch there is invisible from inside your own website. The same applies to virtual-office addresses shared with thousands of other companies - legal, but a weak identity signal.

History you inherited without knowing it

• A previously suspended domain. If your domain hosted a store that was suspended under a previous owner, you can inherit that history.
• A "fresh start" account. If this account was opened after an earlier one was suspended, Google may treat it as circumvention regardless of how compliant the new store is. This is the one case where the suspension is working as designed.
• An agency's account structure. Accounts created inside a marketing agency's MCA carry the trust profile of that MCA and every account in it.

The natural instinct after a rejection is to appeal again immediately - tweak something small, resubmit, hope. Resist it. In this specific situation, rapid repeat appeals carry real costs:

The other tempting escape routes are equally unproductive here. Waiting for a stuck review to resolve itself has its own failure mode, covered in what to do when your appeal sits under review with no response. And escalating to support in the hope that a human will finally explain the specifics generally produces the same template through a different channel - see why Merchant Center support keeps sending copy-paste answers.

Everything above still leaves the core injustice untouched: you are being held to a checklist you are not allowed to see. Inside Google's internal process, that does not change. No appeal, no support ticket and no form ever obliges Google to state, specifically, what your store still violates. The internal process is built so that Google never has to substantiate the decision - it only has to repeat it. That policy category and a link to a help page is all the explanation the system is designed to give; the mechanics of that are covered in what a misrepresentation suspension actually means.

For merchants established in the European Union, there is one route where that asymmetry flips: escalating the suspension to a certified out-of-court dispute settlement body under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA). This is an independent, formal procedure outside Google's systems, and it changes the rules of the exchange in exactly the way a compliance-complete merchant needs:

• Google has to present its position to an independent reviewer. Inside the internal process, the template is the whole answer. In a dispute proceeding, an unsubstantiated category name is a weakness, not an answer. In one of the cases we won, the decisive argument was precisely that Google could not point to anything concrete that was still wrong.
• Your documented fixes finally get read. The before-and-after record you built - every fix, dated, with evidence - is exactly what an evidence-based procedure rewards and exactly what the automated appeal pipeline ignores.
• The compliance-complete merchant is the strongest possible claimant. This route is not a loophole for stores with live violations; a store that is genuinely clean, with a documented trail proving it, is the textbook case for it.

This is precisely why the work described in the earlier sections is not wasted even when the appeals it supported were rejected. The audit that rules out residual website issues, the check of linked accounts and entity consistency, the dated record of every fix - all of it becomes the evidence file for the dispute. The full picture of how the route works, who is eligible and what the proceedings look like is in our overview of the DSA appeal route for Merchant Center suspensions.

Two honest caveats. First, the route is available only to businesses established in the EU. Second, it is a genuinely independent review: if a real violation or a disqualifying account-history problem remains, the reviewer will find it. That is why the audit comes first - escalation is the step you take when the audit says your case is strong, not a substitute for it.

The bottom line

If you truly fixed everything Google asked for and the template keeps coming back, stop guessing. Either something specific and findable is still firing - on a page you did not check, in an account setting you did not touch, or in an account history you did not know you had - or your store is clean and the internal process is simply never going to say so. The first case is solved by a machine-level audit; the second, for EU merchants, is solved by a forum where Google finally has to answer with specifics instead of a template.