Short answer
No. Merchant Center reports whether your feed passes its own validation, not whether the data in it is true. Across five accounts we audited, four reported zero issues and we found 56 real problems between them, including one account reading 100% eligible while sending menswear to women.
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What the dashboard is actually telling you
Merchant Center checks that required fields are present and correctly formatted. It cannot check whether they are correct. A price is valid if it is a number in the right currency; nothing verifies it matches your website. A category is valid if it exists; nothing verifies it describes your product.
So “zero issues” means “nothing failed validation”. It is a spelling check, not a fact check, and treating it as a health score is the single most expensive assumption in Google Shopping.
It fails in both directions
Green when it should be red. One account read 100% eligible with zero issues, and the catalogue was serving menswear to a women's audience. Another read 96 to 99% eligible while broken in ways that were costing it every comparison it entered.
Red when nothing is wrong. One account reported 0.0% eligible for a reason unconnected to any of its five real failures. Another showed 46.8% eligible, which turned out to be an artefact of an unused local channel rather than a catalogue defect: nothing needed rewriting at all.
A number that is wrong in both directions is not a weak signal. It is not a signal.
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The five things that are usually actually wrong
Prices that disagree with the page. A feed price *above* the page price passes validation silently and loses every Shopping comparison it enters. We have proven this twice, on unrelated stores run by different agencies.
Identifiers that look filled in and are not. Migrated stores frequently carry timestamp junk in the barcode field. That kills the GTIN and also the brand-plus-MPN fallback, and in the admin every product looks complete.
Titles coming from the wrong field. Some integrations send the SEO title rather than the product title. Fixing the visible product name changes the website and does nothing to the feed.
Silent product caps. A feed with far fewer products than your catalogue is often a free plugin tier quietly limiting it, not a misconfiguration you can find in the settings.
Categories that mean something else. Camera tripods flagged as gun parts is a real category problem, not a bad appeal. It is fixed in the product category and the description language, never by appealing.
How to check it yourself in fifteen minutes
Pick five products at random. For each, open the product in Merchant Center and open the live page side by side.
Compare price, availability, title and image. Not roughly: exactly.
Count the products in the feed and compare that to the products in your catalogue. If the numbers differ, find out why before anything else.
Look at the barcode field on ten products. If it holds long numeric strings that look like timestamps rather than real barcodes, it is junk.
If all five match and the counts agree, your feed is probably genuinely healthy, which does happen, and is worth knowing.