Verify and claim URL for Merchant Center

Summary

Only one Merchant Center account is considered authoritative for a given merchant website. To prove that you are the authoritative source of information, you must verify the URL that is configured for your Merchant Center account to show that you have access to the website, and then you must claim that URL to assert that you are the authoritative source of product information.

Manual steps

Follow the steps in the Help Center article on verifying and claiming your website URL.

Automatic steps

To automate Merchant Center website claiming, you'll first need to use the Google Site Verification API to verify that you have access to the website you want to claim. Once this is done, then you can use the Content API for Shopping to claim the website.

1. Follow the steps in Getting Started with the Google Site Verification API to verify that you have access to the listed website. Multiple Google accounts can verify access to the same website.

   Note: If the authenticated user for your calls to the Site Verification API does not have access to the Merchant Center account, then you should add the email address for a user that does have access to the owners[] field of the WebResource when calling either the insert or update methods.

2. Once verified, you can then use the Accounts.claimwebsite method in the Content API for Shopping to assert that your Merchant Center account is the authoritative source of products for this website.

   Note: If the website has already been claimed by another Merchant Center, then attempts to claim the website may fail. If so, the error message will contain contact information for the current claimant. If the existing claimant drops their claim by changing the website URL on their Merchant Center account, then you can proceed with claiming the website automatically. Otherwise, overwriting an existing claim for a website must be performed manually.
   Caution: The claiming Merchant Center account may have a claim at a higher level, which covers uses at all lower levels, and so lower levels cannot be separately claimed. For example, a Merchant Center claiming http://example.com means that another Merchant Center cannot claim http://merchant.example.com, and a claim of http://marketplace.example.com means that http://marketplace.example.com/store cannot be separately claimed.