Merchant products no longer appearing in Shopify Catalog API

MCP & LLM
1

We are agency working with a French merchant on Shopify. As part of our agentic commerce exploration, we have been using the Catalog API and Catalog MCP to search and discover products from this merchant’s store.

The store is active, products are published, have taxonomy categories, stock, and are available for sale. The Storefront MCP and Storefront API work perfectly fine for this store.

What worked before

A few weeks ago, searching the Catalog API returned products from this merchant’s store correctly. We have saved responses showing valid results with proper shop data, variant details, checkout URLs, and UPIDs.

For example, a simple search query like below returned the merchant’s products with full variant and shop information.


GET /global/v2/search?query={keyword}&limit=10

What is happening now

The exact same queries now return empty results. We tested every available endpoint systematically.

Search endpoint

  • Searching with the merchant’s name returns zero results

  • Searching with shop_ids parameter using the merchant’s shop GID returns zero results

  • Searching with available_for_sale=0 still returns zero results

  • Generic queries (like “robe”, “sac”) return results from other stores but never from this merchant

Lookup by UPID

  • Using a UPID from a previous successful response now returns {"errors": {"product": ["Not found"]}}

  • Adding available_for_sale=0 does not change the result

Lookup by variant

  • Using a variant ID from a previous successful response also returns {"errors": {"product": ["Not found"]}}

Meanwhile

  • The Storefront MCP scoped to this merchant’s store works perfectly

  • The merchant’s products are active, in stock, and have taxonomy categories assigned

  • No changes were made to the merchant’s store configuration between the working and non-working periods

What we ruled out

  • Not a ships_to filter issue (tested with the merchant’s country and without)

  • Not an available_for_sale filter issue (tested with value set to 0)

  • Not a query issue (tested with product names, brand names, generic terms)

  • Not a Saved Catalog configuration issue (tested both with and without saved catalog)

  • Not a product-level issue (the entire shop is absent, not just individual products)

Environment

  • Merchant store located in France

  • Catalog API v2 endpoints

  • Authentication via Dev Dashboard API keys (JWT token)

  • Tested using both REST API and MCP server

Question

Is there a known eligibility mechanism or indexing process that could cause a previously indexed merchant to be removed from the global Catalog? We could not find documentation on merchant eligibility criteria or opt-in/opt-out processes.

We are happy to share merchant details, shop GID, and previous successful API responses privately if that helps investigate.

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