New Merchant Center terms hit Monday. The 30-minute audit before July.

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Monday, June 15, Google's new Merchant Center Terms of Service took effect.

There was no checkbox.

Continued use of Merchant Center after that date is acceptance. So if your Shopping ads ran this week, you already agreed.

Almost nobody read what they signed.

Here's what you actually agreed to… and the one call you owe this week so you're not the account that goes dark in July over a setting you weren’t told to check.

It's June, which means your Q4 SMS calendar is a blank page and you haven't noticed, because summer is loud.

That's the trap. Planning never feels urgent until it's late, and then the back half gets built in an October panic. The panic version always misses the easy dates, the ones that were sitting right there in June when nobody was looking.

The fix costs nothing.

​Postscript put together a free 2026 SMS calendar: every text-worthy date with a campaign idea attached. Bookmark it, or drop it straight into your own.

Do it now, while there's slack. Summer is the last quiet window before the rush, and mapping the back half today is a coffee-length job. In October it's a fire drill.

Grab the calendar HERE.

Three sections of the new terms that actually matter to operators.

- Content submission. Clarified language on what you submit to Google and what Google can do with it across Search, Shopping, Maps, and anything it ships next.

- Forward-looking data processing. A clause that pre-clears your feed, structured data, and performance data for products that don't exist yet. This is the legal scaffolding for AI shopping surfaces and the Universal Commerce Protocol Google announced in May, with full enforcement expected in 2027.

- Marketing email indexing. Now inside the binding terms, default on.

Open the ToS hub and read those three sections. It's a 10-minute read for terms you've already accepted.

Google's systems subscribe to your newsletter through your own public signup form, then index your promotional sends, sales, promotions, social content, images.

That content can surface across Search, Shopping, and Maps.

It's been running worldwide since May 2025, and the June terms make it binding.

You're opted in unless you say otherwise.

It leaves transactional and personal email alone. The operator problem is control.

- It's account-level only. No per-send control, so Monday's 20% off blast can surface during next week's full-price launch.

- There's no dedicated reporting on what surfaced or what it contributed. Content pulled into features like Promotions may show in those features' existing reporting, but the upside can't be cleanly measured.

The one lever Google hands you is approving specific email content before it runs in Google Ads, but that only covers the paid side.

Organic surfacing gets no preview at all. So you're weighing hard-to-measure upside against a real loss of brand control.

Opt-out path:

> Settings> General> Marketing content usage> "Do not share data."

Past emails get deleted. Already-surfaced content may linger temporarily.

Make the call deliberately this week. Discount-heavy senders should default to opt out. Brand-led senders with disciplined calendars can leave it on. Either way, it's now a decision, not a default.

The "products and services that don't yet exist" language pre-clears your merchant data for agentic and AI shopping surfaces before they launch.

There's nothing to action here, just something to see coming, your feed is quietly becoming the raw input for surfaces that don't exist yet, which means feed quality is about to matter well beyond the Shopping tab.

If you have regulated-category exposure, supplements or anything healthcare-adjacent, or you have formal data oversight internally, flag the clause to that team now.

The ToS update is the paperwork. 2026 enforcement is the exposure.

The March out-of-stock rule has driven more suspensions than any other change this year, and the reason is mechanical.

An active buy button on an out-of-stock page is now misrepresentation, an account-level violation, not a feed error.

Shopify default themes keep the buy button live on out-of-stock variants, so the problem is baked in for anyone who never touched it.

Per GMC Checker's scan data, 58% of stores have at least one OOS product with an active buy button.

Return policies are the other trap.

They now need explicit digital goods, subscription cancellation, and restocking fee language.

And enforcement bites hardest if you sell digital or subscription products, where a generic policy now means disapproval.

Per GMC Checker, 71% of scanned stores miss the new requirements.

AI verification reviews now complete in 2 to 12 hours instead of 3 to 7 days, which means suspensions land faster too.

Pull up your top OOS product page right now and look at the button.

Here's the arithmetic, and it's illustrative, not a benchmark.

Take your monthly Shopping spend and halve it.

That's roughly what two weeks dark looks like in spend alone, before lost contribution margin, and before the reinstatement queue, where every appeal makes the next one harder.

I'm not putting a fixed number on suspension length because durations vary, but the math scales with your spend, and the fix costs an afternoon.

Run that number for your own account before you decide compliance can wait.

1. Check OOS theme behavior. Confirm the buy button is hidden or disabled on every unavailable variant.

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2. Sweep feed-to-PDP consistency: price, availability, title, image.

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3. Update the returns policy with digital goods, subscription, and restocking language.

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4. Make the marketing content usage decision deliberately.

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5. Confirm identity verification is complete. Required for all merchants in the US, CA, UK, EU, and AU since January, 30 days from request or your products come down.

The operators who get suspended in July won't be edge cases.

They'll be default Shopify configs that assumed someone else was checking.

You audit the ad account every week. Merchant Center compliance, almost never.

Everyone who kept running ads this week already accepted these terms.

Read what you signed before a Q3 promo window finds the gap for you.

If you want a growth partner who is invested in helping you build a profitable business, someone who is going to push you to make changes that focus on profitable growth. Book a call - let’s chat​

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Disclaimer: Thank you to Postscript for sponsoring today's newsletter.