Google Merchant Center reports Invalid UTF-8 encoding when something is wrong with the text encoding of your product data. Merchant Center supports UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin-1 and ASCII (Google Merchant Center Help, How to fix: Invalid UTF-8 encoding), so the fix is to save the feed file in one of those encodings, ideally UTF-8, and declare the encoding in XML files that use Latin-1 or UTF-16.
What the encoding errors mean
A text file stores characters as bytes according to an encoding. When the file is written in one encoding and read as another, accented letters and non-Latin scripts turn into garbled text, often called mojibake (Google Merchant Center Help, Encoding settings for garbled text).
As of October 2026, Google has two related issues:
- Invalid UTF-8 encoding: the text encoding of your product data is wrong (Google Merchant Center Help, How to fix: Invalid UTF-8 encoding).
- Invalid character encoding: the text in the
product_highlightattribute has incorrect encoding, so Merchant Center can't read it, and a file in an unsupported encoding may not be processed at all (Google Merchant Center Help, How to fix: Invalid character encoding).
Encodings Merchant Center supports
| Encoding | Notes |
|---|---|
| UTF-8 | Covers every language; the safest choice |
| UTF-16 | XML files must declare it in the first line |
| Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) | XML files must declare it in the first line |
| ASCII | English letters, digits and basic symbols only |
Source: Google Merchant Center Help, How to fix: Invalid UTF-8 encoding. A file saved in any other encoding, for example a regional encoding used by a spreadsheet program for Chinese or Japanese text, has to be converted to one of these before Merchant Center can read it reliably.
How to fix the encoding
Google's fixes (Google Merchant Center Help, How to fix: Invalid UTF-8 encoding):
- If you aren't sure which encoding the file uses, select the Autodetect option.
- Re-save the file. In Notepad, use Save As and choose UTF-8 (or ANSI) under Encoding. Spreadsheet programs have a similar "CSV UTF-8" or encoding option when saving.
- Declare the encoding in XML. For an XML file in Latin-1 or UTF-16, state it in the first line, for example
encoding="ISO-8859-1"in the XML declaration for Latin-1. - Upload the file again and check the Needs attention page. Changes may take 24–72 hours to show there.
For Invalid character encoding on individual products, edit the affected products under Products > Needs attention, or download the .csv list, correct the product_highlight values and upload them again (Google Merchant Center Help, How to fix: Invalid character encoding).
Feeds published by Product Feed Master
The XML feed that Product Feed Master publishes for Merchant Center is written as UTF-8 and declares it in its first line, so the published file itself does not need re-saving (how to create a Google Merchant Center feed URL). If characters already look wrong in your source data, fix the encoding of the source file or store export first; see scheduled fetch failed for other reasons a file can't be processed.
Frequently asked questions
Which encoding should a Google Shopping feed use?
UTF-8. Merchant Center also supports UTF-16, Latin-1 and ASCII, but UTF-8 covers every language.
Do I need an XML declaration for UTF-8?
Google's fix page asks you to declare the encoding for XML files in Latin-1 or UTF-16. Declaring UTF-8 in the first line is harmless and makes the encoding explicit.
Why do accented letters look garbled in Merchant Center?
The file was most likely saved in one encoding and read as another. Re-save it as UTF-8 and upload it again.