← All disapproval codes
critical image_link broken

Image link broken or inaccessible

What this means

Google's crawler tried to fetch your product image and failed — 404, redirect chain, or auth challenge. Without an image, the product is disapproved.

Why this happens

Most often a stale CDN URL (image moved or deleted), a redirect to a 404, or an image hosted on a domain that requires login or referer headers Google doesn't send. Sometimes a temporarily-down CDN trips this for a window.

How to fix it

  1. Open every image_link URL directly in an incognito browser. Anything that doesn't return the image needs fixing.
  2. Replace broken URLs with current, public CDN paths.
  3. Avoid hosting images behind authentication or signed URLs — Googlebot won't authenticate.
  4. Re-publish the feed and wait for the next crawl pass (4–24 hours).

Common pitfalls