Why is Google Merchant Center creating duplicate "Found by Google" listings for products I already send it through Shopify?
If Google Merchant Center is showing two versions of the same product, one from your Shopify feed and one it "found" on its own, the fix lives in Merchant Center settings, not in your Shopify app list.
What's going on
You connected the Google & YouTube sales channel in Shopify, your feed is submitted and approved, and everything looks fine, until you check Google Merchant Center and see a second version of the same product. It's labeled "Found by Google" (an automatically-created or crawler-discovered listing) sitting right next to the one your Shopify feed submitted. Same product, two entries, and sometimes the auto-found one has stale pricing, a missing variant, or an outdated image because Google scraped it from your site independently instead of reading your feed data.
This isn't a bug in your Shopify app. Merchant Center has long had a feature where its crawler indexes product pages it finds on the web, whether or not a merchant ever submitted a feed, and builds its own lightweight listing from whatever it can parse off the page. When you also submit a proper feed through Shopify's Google & YouTube channel, Google doesn't always recognize the two as the same product, especially if there's any mismatch in identifiers, URL structure, or if your Merchant Center domain verification has fallen out of sync with the channel. The result is two competing listings for one product, which can dilute Shopping ad performance, muddy free listing impressions, and occasionally show shoppers outdated information.
Why it happens
Google Merchant Center runs its own web crawler independent of any feed you submit. If it can parse product-like markup on your storefront, it will generate an automatically-created listing from that page, regardless of whether you've already submitted the same product through an app-based feed like Shopify's Google & YouTube channel.
Google is supposed to de-duplicate these against your submitted feed, but that matching relies on close agreement between identifiers and a verified, matching domain. Any small mismatch, an unverified domain, a theme migration, or inconsistent structured data, and Google treats the crawler-found version as a separate, unmatched offer instead of merging it.
5 ways to fix it
Disable automatically-created listings in Google Merchant Center for your domain
Inside Google Merchant Center, find the automatically-created (or crawler-discovered) listings setting and turn it off for the domain your Shopify Google & YouTube channel submits from. This stops Google's independent crawler-found offers from being generated at all, leaving only the feed your Shopify app submits. It's the cleanest fix because it addresses the source instead of cleaning up duplicates after the fact.
Reconnect and re-verify the Shopify Google & YouTube sales channel
In Shopify admin, open the Google & YouTube channel and confirm your store's domain is still verified and claimed under the same Google account linked to Merchant Center. When verification lapses or the channel falls out of sync, which commonly happens after a domain change, theme change, or re-authenticating Google, Merchant Center can fall back to crawling your site and generating its own listings instead of trusting your submitted feed. Reconnecting and letting a full resync finish often clears the duplicates within a few days.
Check your theme's product schema for mismatched identifiers
Google's crawler-based discovery is often triggered by product schema markup your theme outputs on each product page, even when you're already submitting the same product through your feed. Compare the GTIN, MPN, and brand fields in your theme's structured data against what's in your submitted feed. A mismatch between the two is a common reason Google treats the crawled page as a separate, unlinked offer instead of merging it with your feed listing.
Use Merchant Center's diagnostics to confirm which listings are duplicated
Merchant Center's diagnostics and product views let you filter by source so you can see which items came from your submitted feed versus which were automatically created. There's no built-in tool to merge two existing listings, so the practical fix is disabling automatic listing creation and fixing the sync or schema issue at the root rather than resolving duplicates item by item. Use this view mainly to confirm the fix actually took effect.
Keep canonical URLs consistent across your store
If your store has more than one URL path resolving to the same product, such as duplicate collection links, translated URLs, or a leftover path from a past domain migration, make sure canonical tags all point to a single definitive URL. When Google's crawler and your submitted feed disagree on which URL is canonical for a product, that mismatch can quietly let duplicate listings creep back in even after automatic listing creation is turned off.
Bottom line
Most of the time this is fixable for free: turn off automatically-created listings in Google Merchant Center and make sure your Shopify Google & YouTube channel is verified and syncing properly, no app purchase required. It's worth checking your theme's structured data and canonical URLs too, since those are the quieter causes that let duplicates reappear even after auto-discovery is disabled. This is a Merchant Center and feed-hygiene issue rather than something a Shopify app can fix directly.
Browse the rest of the problem library, run a free storefront scan to catch issues like this automatically, or email us and we'll work out a custom solution for it.