Merchant Center Suspended Over Someone Else's Ads Account: What to Check

Imagine opening Merchant Center and finding a suspension notice. Your product ads are off. You look for the cause in your own store: prices, contact details, photos. Everything is clean. Then it turns out another Google Ads account is linked to your Merchant Center, an old one nobody remembers, and the problem sits there. Here is what is known for sure, what is not, and what you can check in ten minutes.

Merchant Center is a free Google account where a store uploads its product data. Google Ads is the advertising account that shows those products. The two are connected by a “link”. We checked the facts against Google’s help on October 27, 2026. Menu names may differ slightly depending on the interface version.

One case, not a law

First, an honest caveat. The story behind this article is a single recent post in a chat of Google Shopping specialists (October 22, 2026). The author wrote that the product account was suspended for a violation in a linked ad account. It turned out two were linked, one of them old, and nobody had access to it. Google support replied: first resolve the suspension of that particular account. How it ended is not written in the thread.

That is one case, and we do not know how often it happens. So we are not saying the same will happen to you. We are saying: check which accounts are linked.

What Google itself says

The mechanism itself is described in Google’s help. There is a separate account status: “Linked account suspension”. Google writes that a suspended Google Ads account is linked to your Merchant Center account, and until it is fixed you cannot request a review of the Merchant Center suspension. The status was introduced in December 2022 under the policy on abuse of the network, and in August 2024 it was extended to free listings.

So a suspension really can arrive “through a neighbor”. It is not an invention from a chat.

Where the sources disagree: does unlinking help

Now the interesting part. Practitioners advise differently.

• Some say: if the ad account is suspended, unlink Merchant Center from it right away. The logic is to unblock one resource instead of both.
• Google’s help says the opposite for a suspension that already exists: removing or unlinking the suspended Google Ads account from your Merchant Center account won’t unsuspend it or resolve the issue. Merchant Center is reviewed only after Google Ads is unsuspended.

We trust Google’s help. Unlinking is prevention, not a cure. If an account you do not know about is not suspended yet, unlinking it is sensible: you remove a stranger’s link from the chain. If the suspension has already happened, unlinking will not help; you need an appeal.

Where forgotten links come from

According to Google’s help, up to 500 Google Ads accounts can be linked to one Merchant Center account, so an “extra” link easily piles up over the years. A former contractor, an employee or you yourself could have created it when first launching ads. There is also a less obvious option: in Merchant Center you can send a link request to a Google Ads account you do not manage, entering only its customer ID. But such a link works only if an admin of that ad account approves it. So a stranger’s account does not appear by itself; someone once had to agree.

Two more rules from the same help page. Before linking, Google advises making sure neither account has account-level policy violations; otherwise you may “connect” a problem yourself. It also recommends turning on 2-step verification for the accounts. That is not about suspensions, but about keeping access to linked accounts out of the wrong hands.

What to do yourself: check your links

In Merchant Center

1. Click the settings icon (the gear) in the left menu and choose “Settings”.
2. Open “Access and services”, then the “Apps and services” page.
3. See which Google Ads accounts are linked there. Write down the customer IDs (ten digits).

In an older interface this section could be called “Linked accounts”. If yours looks different, look for the words “linked” or “services”.

In Google Ads

Open “Tools” → “Data manager” and find Google Merchant Center there. According to the help, the “Manage & link” page shows all link requests and active links. This is a useful check from the other side: if the account is yours, you will see which Merchant Center accounts it is linked to.

What to do with an unknown account

• Find out whose it is. Perhaps a former contractor or employee created it. We wrote separately about removing such access: a former contractor is still an admin.
• If the account is yours but you lost access, recover access through Google. It is easier to do while nothing is suspended.
• If it is someone else’s and not needed, unlink it. A Merchant Center admin or a Google Ads admin can unlink. If the link goes through Business Manager, only a super admin can unlink.

Before unlinking, note: afterwards the product campaigns of that ad account stop showing ads based on your Merchant Center data, and new such campaigns cannot be created. Ads from other campaign types keep running. If the account is alive and runs your ads, do not unlink it without agreeing first.

If the suspension has already happened

According to Google’s help, the order is:

1. Appeal the suspension of the Google Ads account. Support should contact you within 5 business days.
2. After Google Ads is unsuspended, sign in to Merchant Center and request a review if the suspension remains.
3. If you sell through a third-party platform, you can sometimes request the review from its app.

In the chat mentioned above, support offered two routes for the old account: the owner or admin answering an access-recovery request, or a verification file in the root of the site advertised from that account. These are one user’s words; we have not confirmed that this procedure applies today, so rely on Google’s help and on your own correspondence with support.

From our practice

When we take on a store, we start with an audit: who has access to Merchant Center, which ad accounts are linked to it, and whether all of them are “alive”. It takes a few minutes, needs no special knowledge, and saves days if something goes wrong later. Other causes of suspensions that an owner can check alone are collected in the article 9 Merchant Center checks.

Summary

1. A Merchant Center suspension really can come from a linked suspended ad account: Google calls it “Linked account suspension”.
2. The story of a forgotten account is one case from a chat, not statistics.
3. Check now: “Settings” → “Access and services” → “Apps and services” in Merchant Center, and “Data manager” in Google Ads.
4. Find out about any unknown account and, if it is not needed, unlink it while there is no suspension.
5. If the suspension already exists, unlinking does not lift it: appeal in Google Ads, then request a review in Merchant Center.

See how we work with product advertising in the Merchant Center section.

Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we’ll look at your account, check which accounts are linked, and tell you what is worth fixing before Google does it for you.