Google Merchant Center: Image link could not be fetched
Couldn't crawl image [image link]What's happening
Google's crawler can't fetch the URL in image_link. Causes: 404, robots.txt blocking, CDN auth required, slow response (timeout), invalid SSL certificate, or HTTP redirect chain too deep.
image_linkadditional_image_linkManual fix
Open the image URL in incognito mode to check it's publicly accessible. Verify robots.txt allows Googlebot. Check your CDN doesn't require referer or signed URLs. Re-upload if the file is corrupt.
Fix it with Emberfeed
When Emberfeed renders catalog images, the served image_link URL points at our CDN with predictable cache headers, no referer requirement, no auth, and proper HTTP/2. The originals on your CDN don't need to be Google-crawlable, only Emberfeed reads them.
Related guide
Catch Google Merchant Center feed issues before they do.
Emberfeed checks every product against Google Merchant Center's required fields and format rules, and most problems come with a fix: a field rule for the whole feed or an override for one product. It also measures your product photos, while rendering them and in the background after each refresh, and flags the ones that are too small for Google Merchant Center.
Emberfeed is a hosted tool: it imports your existing product feed, renders every product image through one template and serves a new feed URL for Meta, Google, TikTok, Heureka, Zboží.cz and Glami. It costs 25 € per feed per month, and the first 3 months are free on one feed up to 1,000 products.