Google-selected canonical: the homepage?

[Andreea-M]

Hi guys,
I checked the product pages on our website with Google Search Console (URL Inspection), and the majority appear as
"URL is not on Google"
Coverage: "Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical", and 
Google-selected canonical: the homepage of the website (for all product pages)

Our product pages are not identical to the homepage (content-wise), besides the top menu, header and footer, so how could I use the canonical tag in this case? I wouldn't want that the product pages to be seen as duplicates of the homepage.

Thanks!

[effectdigital]

That is a very weird situation and I think that, adding some canonical tags may not meet with your expectations. If Google have strong views about what is / is not a canonical URL, they will usually override canonical tags anyway (which is usually when you get the error you have described). I think we'd really need to see some examples of actual URLs to help you