My Merchant Center appeal has been 'under review' for weeks. Is anyone actually looking at it?

The status label suggests a person is working through your file. In most cases, that is not what is happening. Merchant Center appeals enter a largely automated pipeline: automated re-checks of your website and feed run first, and only a subset of cases is ever routed to a human queue. The "under review" status covers every stage of that pipeline equally - it displays the same whether your appeal is actively being processed, sitting in a queue, or has effectively stalled with no one assigned to it.

That is why the status is so uninformative. It does not distinguish between:

• Normal processing. Most appeals resolve within a few days to a couple of weeks. If you are inside that window, silence is not yet a signal of anything. Typical timelines are covered in how long a Merchant Center suspension takes to resolve.
• A queued manual review. Some appeals - often after multiple prior rejections, or where the automated result is ambiguous - wait for human capacity. These queues have no published service level and no visible position.
• A genuinely stuck case. Appeals do fall through the cracks. Accounts flagged for certain policy categories, accounts entangled with linked or suspended sibling accounts, and accounts caught mid-way through internal tooling changes can sit unresolved for months. Nothing in your dashboard tells you this has happened.

It is also worth knowing what "under review" does not mean: it does not mean your case is difficult, important, or receiving extra scrutiny. The emails you may receive during this period - if you receive any - are templated. They are not written by a person reading your file, and their wording carries no information about your specific situation.

Because the status tells you nothing, the only rational way to manage this period is by elapsed time. Based on the cases we handle, here is how to read the silence:

Notice what these thresholds are for. They are not deadlines after which Google owes you anything - Google publishes no service level for appeals and commits to none. They are decision points for you: markers for when to shift from waiting to preparing, and from preparing to escalating.

Around week two, almost every merchant does the same thing: opens a support chat or files a contact form asking for a status update. It feels like action. It changes nothing, and it is important to understand why, so you stop spending hours on it.

• Support agents cannot see inside the review. The people answering Merchant Center chat and email are a separate function from the teams and systems that process appeals. They can see that an appeal exists and that its status is "under review" - the same information you can see. They cannot see why it is pending, where it sits, or when it will resolve, and they cannot escalate it onto anyone's desk.
• The replies are templates. "Your appeal is being reviewed by the relevant team, please wait" is not a status report; it is the standard response for this query type. Many replies are partly or fully bot-generated. Ten chats produce the same sentence ten times. We cover this pattern in detail in why Merchant Center support only sends copy-paste answers.
• "It has been escalated" is not a mechanism. Agents will sometimes say your case has been escalated or flagged. There is no evidence in any case we have handled that this moves an appeal in the queue. Treat it as a polite way to end the conversation, not as progress.
• Chasing carries a small risk of harm. Messages sent in frustration become part of your account's communication record. Accusations and threats never help, and a hastily written message that misstates your own facts can sit awkwardly next to a carefully built case later.

One honest caveat: if you run Google Ads spend at a level that gives you a dedicated account representative, a polite internal nudge through that channel occasionally surfaces information. For everyone else, the support channel is a wall, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you spend your energy where it compounds.

There is a deeper point here. The appeal pipeline and the support channel are both one-way surfaces of the same closed system. Nothing you say into either of them obliges Google to decide. That asymmetry - you must wait, Google need not answer - is exactly what the escalation route in the last section was created to correct.

The silent weeks do not have to be dead time. Whatever happens next - a late approval, a late rejection, or continued silence that you escalate - the same preparation serves you. Merchants who start this work in week two are ready to act the moment a threshold is crossed; merchants who spend the same weeks refreshing the dashboard start from zero in week six.

Here is the part of this situation that almost no merchant knows. Everything above assumes the only path forward runs through Google eventually answering. If your business is established in the European Union, that assumption is wrong.

Under the EU Digital Services Act, merchants can bring disputes about a platform's moderation decisions before a certified out-of-court dispute settlement body under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) - an independent reviewer, certified by a national regulator, that examines the evidence from both sides and reaches its own conclusion. Most merchants who have heard of this route at all think of it as a tool against rejections: Google said no, an independent body re-examines the no. That is true, and it is how the route is usually used - the full picture is in our overview of the DSA dispute route for Merchant Center suspensions.

But the route matters just as much for your situation, where Google has said nothing:

• A failure to decide is itself a grievance the route addresses. The DSA framework expects platforms to handle complaints in a timely, diligent, non-arbitrary way. An appeal that sits at "under review" for months, while a suspension keeps your products offline the entire time, is not timely handling of anything. You are not required to extract a formal rejection from Google before you can act - the stalled state, properly documented, is a case.
• The proceeding runs on its own timeline, not Google's queue. Once a dispute is filed with a certified body, the process moves on a defined schedule with deadlines for both sides. Google responds within the proceeding because the proceeding requires it. Contested cases can still take weeks - our fastest win concluded in roughly two and a half weeks, and complex ones run longer - but "weeks on a fixed procedural track" is a different universe from "months of open-ended silence with no track at all".
• Your waiting-period preparation becomes the case file. The dated timeline, the weekly status screenshots, the audit results, the identity evidence - everything from the previous section slots directly into the dispute file. This is why preparing during the silence is not busywork: it is literally the escalation, assembled in advance.

Two honest limits. First, this route is only available if your business entity is established in the EU - a merchant based in the US, UK or elsewhere cannot use it, and for those merchants the realistic options remain the internal ones covered elsewhere on this site. Second, the independent reviewer judges the merits, not the delay alone: if your store genuinely violates Google's policies, escalating a stalled appeal produces an independent confirmation of the suspension, not a rescue. The route is powerful for compliant merchants trapped in Google's queue. It is not a bypass for stores with live violations - which is exactly why the audit in the previous section comes first.

What changes psychologically is just as important as what changes procedurally. The moment you know a stalled non-decision can be taken out of Google's hands and put in front of an independent body on a schedule, you stop being a hostage to the queue. The waiting period gets a defined end that you control - and in our experience, merchants who know their exit point make calmer, better decisions during the silence than merchants refreshing a dashboard that will never explain itself. And unlike the merchants whose appeals were rejected within hours by an automated pipeline, you have one small advantage: nothing has been decided against you yet, and a well-prepared file meets a genuinely open question.

The bottom line

"Under review" is not evidence that anyone is reviewing anything. Give the process its realistic window - a week of patience, two or three weeks of quiet preparation - and then treat the silence itself as the decision. Document every week, audit your store honestly, assemble your evidence, and if your business is in the EU, know that a stalled non-decision can be placed before a certified out-of-court dispute settlement body on a fixed timeline. The queue is only a cage if you agree to stay in it.