Titles, prices, or images flip in Google without anyone editing them
Two feed tools, one catalog: what happens when sources conflict
It starts with small mysteries. A product title in Google is not the one in Shopify. A price flips to a value nobody set. An image disappears from a listing that had one yesterday. Each looks like a glitch; together they are the signature of two feed sources fighting over one catalog.
How you end up with competing sources
Nobody plans this. A store starts with the official channel, later adds a feed tool for better control, and the old source keeps running. Or an agency inherits an account with a supplemental feed nobody remembers. Or a migration leaves the previous app installed. Merchant Center happily accepts products from all of them.
What Google does with a conflict
When two sources submit the same offer, Google does not merge and does not warn. It picks a winner, one product record with one winning source, and the loser’s data simply stops mattering. Here is the part that makes this invisible: the product list never shows a duplicate. You cannot see the conflict by looking, because the conflict resolves before anything is displayed.
So when the winner changes, everything the losing source did differently lands at once: its title, its price, its image handling, its missing fields. From the outside this looks like data corruption with no author.
The manual diagnosis
List your data sources in Merchant Center and be suspicious of any store with more than one primary product source. For a product behaving strangely, check which source currently owns it, then compare that source’s submitted values against Shopify. If the owner is not the source you believe runs your feed, you have found your ghostwriter.
What you cannot do manually is catch the moment of takeover, because there is no log to read. The ownership just changes between one submission and the next.
The monitored version
FeedWarden snapshots which source owns every product on every scan. When ownership changes, that is an incident: the offer, the source it moved from, the source it moved to, both by name, plus whatever data changed in the same window. The fix guidance is concrete, naming the conflicting source to remove or scope in Merchant Center’s data source settings, and the evidence packet documents the takeover for whoever manages the feeds.