Google Merchant Center: Promotional overlay on image
Promotional overlay on image [image link]What's happening
Google Merchant Center prohibits promotional text or graphics on the image_link image. "SALE", "20% OFF", "Free shipping", price stickers, urgency banners, all rejected. The rule applies even when the overlay is small or in a corner. This rule does not apply to additional_image_link, but most placements use the primary image_link.
image_linkManual fix
Open every product image, remove the overlay in Photoshop or your editing tool, re-export, re-upload to your CDN, wait for the feed to refresh, then wait for Google to re-fetch and re-validate. Hours of work if the overlay was burned into thousands of product photos.
Fix it with Emberfeed
Duplicate your feed in Emberfeed for Google with a clean template (no text, no logo, no border, white background, product filling 75–90% of the frame; Google's image rules also rule out logos and brand names as overlays). Keep your aggressive promo template on the Meta feed. Same source URL, two served outputs, Google sees the clean version, Meta sees the promo version. Switch in 30 seconds.
Full platform spec
Related guide
Related rejections
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.