Merchant Center video link dangerous products violation: fix it

A "Video link content violation (dangerous products)" in Merchant Center means Google's review decided the video behind a product's video_link appears to depict or promote dangerous products. The fix is to remove that URL or replace it with a video that follows the policy, then update the product data or wait for your scheduled upload, and the change can take 24 to 72 hours to reach the Needs attention page. The product itself keeps showing: the help page says products with disapproved videos still display and the video disapproval does not change your account status.

Those facts come from Google's page How to fix: Video link content violation (dangerous products) and the attribute page [Video link [video_link]](https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/15216925?hl=en), both read on 2026-10-03. Sume's side comes from its video trim, video inspect and video generation docs. Google makes the policy call; Sume's docs describe no step that pre-checks a clip against Merchant Center policy.

What does the violation actually say?

The help page is short. It gives the reason (the linked video appears to depict or promote dangerous products, which is prohibited), three fix steps, and an appeal route. It does not list which products count: it points you to Google's dangerous products policy, so read that policy for the specific categories rather than guessing from the label.

The consequences are narrow, which is why this is a clip problem and not a catalog problem.

Should I edit the file or change the URL?

Change the URL. The attribute page says new video URLs typically reprocess within 24 to 72 hours, while reusing the same URL for different content can take up to 6 weeks for the recrawl to notice. It also asks for stable links that are not reused for different videos. So a corrected clip on the old filename is the slowest route you can pick.

If only part of the clip is the problem, you do not need to regenerate the whole thing. Cut the offending seconds out and publish the result under a new address. If the whole concept is the problem, make a new clip from a new brief. Either way, keep the original file so you can show what was submitted if you appeal.

How do I make the replacement with Sume?

Sume's video trim takes one clip on media.sume.com plus a start and exactly one of end or duration, and returns a new MP4 with a new artifact URL, never the source's. That is the property you want here: the replacement arrives on a fresh URL by construction. A trim costs $0.02 per job and the source can be up to 1800 seconds. Merchant Center needs the result to stay between 6 and 240 seconds, so check the length first.

Probe the file before you cut so you know its duration and size (Merchant's cap is 500 MB; the probe returns duration_seconds and size_bytes), then cut around the problem. This example keeps the first 12 seconds of a clip that is fine up to that point and drops the rest.

# 1. probe: duration_seconds, size_bytes, width, height
curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-inspect \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: vlink-probe-001" \
  -d '{"video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/product.mp4", "frames": false}'

# 2. cut [0, 12) into a NEW artifact
curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-trim \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: vlink-trim-001" \
  -d '{"video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/product.mp4", "start": 0, "duration": 12}'

What if the whole clip has to go?

Generate a new one. With Sume's video generation you pick a model from GET /v1/videos/models and read its limits there. Mind the floor: Merchant Center needs at least 6 seconds, and some Sume models start lower (for example seedance-2.5 accepts 4 to 30 seconds, and gemini-omni-flash-1.1 3 to 10), so ask for 8 seconds or more rather than the shortest clip a model allows. Ask for 9:16, 16:9 or 1:1 and at least 720p, with no black bars, to meet the attribute page's other limits.

Write the new brief around what the product does in ordinary use, and keep it to the product you actually sell. A clip that repeats the scene Google flagged gives you no reason to expect a different decision, and each new review round takes the same 24 to 72 hours to show.

• Keep the old clip's file and URL for the appeal.
• Put the replacement on a new URL, then update the product data.
• Check 6 to 240 seconds, 500 MB, 720p and no black bars before you resubmit.
• Look at the Needs attention page after 24 to 72 hours, not sooner.