Knowing when a Merge Request is performed

Summary:

When approving a merge request, how do you tell if someone has first done a merge into their branch?

Content (please ensure you mask any confidential information):

We perform a merge before making VBS changes every time we go to publish. It's hit or miss thought if we are seeing a commit message that reads: Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/main' into 20250911. Why does this VBS message sometime show up and sometimes not if we first performed a merge before our publish? Is there a consistent place we can go to, to see if our end users have first done a merge before making their changes and publishing their changes? We want to ensure that is done before approving and merging their requests.