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Trust & Safety
Google helps to enable a free and open internet by providing the ability for publishers to monetize their content and for advertisers to reach prospective customers with useful, relevant products and services.
We do well when our publishers do well. Our success is inherently tied to that of our publishers.
We provide transparent policy education through publicly posting our policies, creating policy videos, and hosting webinars and conferences worldwide. We continuously invest in making our publisher policies, publisher restrictions, and enforcement of policy violations understandable, and consistent.
Policies & Restrictions
When you monetize your content with Google ad code, you’re required to adhere to the Google Publisher Policies. By content we mean anything present on your page or app - including user generated content like comment sections, other advertisements and links to other sites or apps. Attempting to monetize policy-violating content and failure to comply with these policies may result in Google blocking ads from appearing against your content, or your account being suspended or terminated.
These policies apply in addition to any other policies governing your use of Google publisher products.
Google Publisher Restrictions identify content that is restricted from receiving certain sources of advertising. By content, we mean anything present on your page or app - including other advertisements and links to other sites or apps.
Monetizing content that falls under the Google Publisher Restrictions is not a policy violation; instead, we restrict advertising on that content as appropriate, based on the preferences of each advertising product or advertisers’ individual preferences. Sometimes this will mean that no advertising sources are bidding on your inventory and no ads will appear on this restricted content.
Google Publisher Policies outline the types of content we won’t monetize through any of our publisher products. These include policies against illegal content, dangerous or derogatory content, and sexually explicit content, among others. This is content that will never be allowed to show ads.
Google Publisher Restrictions, by contrast, outline the types of content, such as Tobacco or Recreational Drugs, that don’t necessarily violate policy but that may not be appealing for all advertisers. This means publishers will not receive policy violations but instead the content will be labeled with an inventory restriction and will likely receive less advertising, or sometimes no advertising, as the advertisers determine the demand.
The Policy center displays all of the current enforcements on your sites. Enforcements can either block all advertising (for example, "Ad serving disabled") or restrict which advertisers can bid on your inventory (for example, "Restricted demand"). Any domains at risk for disabled ad serving will first receive a warning, prior to enforcement action being taken and ad serving being disabled for the violating domain. Publishers should ensure they fix their ad density issues across their site as soon as possible once receiving this initial warning. If they do not address their site issues and submit an appeal, they may receive site-level enforcement.
You may receive enforcements due to various issues with your content:
- Google Publisher Policy must be fixed. Policy violations are enforced with either "Ad serving disabled" or "Restricted demand".
- Google Publisher Restrictions are not policy violations so you don't need to change your content or ad requests. However, content with publisher restrictions receives "Restricted demand".
- Access the Policy center, which gives you detailed information about issues that may restrict ads from appearing on your sites, site sections, pages or apps, and the steps to resolve issues with ad serving and request reviews after you've made changes. The main page of the Policy center provides an overview of your affected sites.
- If the "Must fix" column says "Yes", one of your sites, site sections or pages is not currently in compliance with Program policies and in this case Google Publisher Policies, as a result, an enforcement has been taken. When the action is taken on a page, then the page is violating policy. When the action is taken on a site or site section, then there are multiple pages within the site or site section that are violating policy. When this occurs, you need to check your entire site or site section and make changes to bring it into compliance with our policies.
- After you address the policy violations on your site, site section, or pages, you may request a review.
No, we do not share our thresholds for enforcement externally.
The fastest way to resolve a policy violation is for a publisher to submit an appeal via their Policy Center.
We’re continually improving our ability to detect and enforce policy violations across our network. Publishers should expect we will enforce all of our policies and should always ensure they are compliant.
If the "Must fix" column says "No", it means that your site has content that falls under the Google Publisher Restrictions. We have buyers from multiple sources, which can include Google Ads, Authorized Buyers, DV360, reservations, and others. So while you can choose to monetize this type of content, you may receive limited ads from some of these other sources but note that Google Ads (formerly AdWords) ads will not serve on content labeled with these restrictions.
Monetizing content that falls under the Google Publisher Restrictions will not be a policy violation; instead, we’ll restrict advertising on that content as outlined above. So while you can choose to monetize content covered by the Google Publisher Restrictions, doing so will mean you’ll likely receive less advertising revenue on restricted content than you would receive on other, fully compliant content.
We understand that advertisers may not find the types of content listed under Google Publisher Restrictions to be appealing, or a good association with their brand, which is why we let them decide. Our advertisers have various categories that they can choose from, and not all will opt into sensitive categories. Therefore, the end result is that content labeled as a restriction may receive limited, or no monetization, however it’s not a policy violation.
Everything we do is designed to protect our publishers, our users and our advertisers. Where you choose to remove non-compliant content on pages, you should also remove any related ad code from that page so that ads are not served next to a blank space.
We understand that it may be an effort on your end to determine if any pages of your site are in violation of policies, but we're also responsible to our advertisers and users, and in order to keep them confident in the ecosystem, we must uphold our policies.
To be perfectly clear, we are not censoring publishers content through the removal of any content on their sites. We simply request the removal of our ad code on non-compliant pages.
You can use the filter and download options in the Policy center to help you find and manage policy violations and publisher restrictions:
- Click filter to only see certain sites, site status, or to only see certain enforcement dates.
- Click download to download a CSV file of all pages or sections with violations for all sites or individual sites.
All UGC is considered to be dynamic content, but not all dynamic content is UGC. User-generated content can include text, comments, images, video, profiles, usernames, votes, likes, hearts, or other media, for example. Ads are not considered user-generated content, unless they contain embedded social media.
We do not have any specific policies governing UGC, but we do provide publishers with additional resources to help them ensure UGC is in compliance with our content policies.
No, after this policy change is implemented, Chat List and non-private Group Chat inventory will be allowed to monetize without participation in beta.
Advertising and other paid promotional material added to your pages should not exceed publisher-content. Publisher-content includes images, videos, games, article text and user-generated content created or managed by the publisher, but it does not include whitespace, header or footer content, or links to other content on the site.
Multiple ad units can help optimize your performance by leveraging our large inventory of ads but remember less can be more. Provided you don't place more ads than content on your pages, you can put a combination of ad units, link units and/or search boxes on each page of your site. However, keep in mind that placing lots of ads on your page may make it look cluttered. If users can't find what they're looking for, they may go elsewhere.
Specific ad format considerations
- Video: Please familiarize yourself with our recent video inventory restrictions update. All In-stream & Accompanying Content placements must also contain non-ad content, otherwise the publisher will receive a More Ads than Content (Video) policy violation.
- Other formats (anchor or sticky ads): Publishers should be cautious when implementing anchor and/or sticky ad units and ensure they do not “overuse” these format types. Because we take into consideration the entire page/screen for our reviews (and not just the portion of the page/screen in view at any time), having multiple instances of these format types that carry down as the user scrolls may result in a More Ads than Content violation.
An advertising trade group comprised of 4A’s, ANA, the World Federation of Advertisers, and the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) define MFA as:
- High ad-to-content ratio (ad to content ratio of 30%+ for desktop).
- Rapidly auto-refreshing ad placements, sites flooded with autoplay video ads, and slide show sites that force visitors to click through multiple pages to access content (with multiple ads).
- High percentage of paid traffic sourcing (low organic traffic).
- Generic content (non-editorial or templated, low-quality content that is often syndicated, dated and not unique).
- Usually poorly designed, templated website designs.
While this is one trade body's definition, there is currently no industry-aligned definition of MFA.
Under our behavioral policies we don't allow ads on spammy content and we prohibit publishers from engaging in disruptive, invasive or deceptive ad-serving practices for the purposes of generating ad revenue. This includes:
- Pages with more ads than publisher content.
- Pages with ads that fully or partially obscure publisher content for any period of time.
- Ad placements that lead to accidental clicks or interfere with users’ experience.
- Replicated content or content that’s been copied from other sites without adding any additional value to that content.
We have clear policies against publishers engaging in certain deceptive or disruptive ad serving practices, which publishers are required to comply with at all times. We cannot comment on whether specific sites or apps are MFA, nor can we share information about their behavioral policy violations unless owned by the publisher requesting this information.
Brand Safety
Please check go/pubprotectionchecklist for a document that can communicate our publisher controls and escalation paths with guidance on best practices. This doc is externally shareable as a pdf.
When we identify these coordinated threats, we urgently assess the situation and take action. Overall, in 2022, we blocked or removed 142 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy and 198 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. Again giving you the full scale picture of the preventative work we do, in 2022, we removed over 5.2 billion ads, restricted over 4.3 billion ads and suspended over 6.7 million advertiser accounts. This represents an increase of 2 billion more ads removed in 2022 from the previous year.
Thank you for reporting the ads, this helps us enforce Google Ads policies. We took swift action on ads and ad accounts that violated our policies once they were detected through reports or proactive tracking. We also conducted a thorough investigation into these ads and accounts. These instances have provided us with specific signals that we are using to detect ads of this nature proactively in future. We are continuously updating both manual review systems and machine learning models to stay one step ahead of abuse and quickly respond to new trends when they appear. Our work to protect users and enable a safe advertising ecosystem that works well for advertisers, publishers and users continues to be a top priority.
The bad ads featuring <Celebrity/Person X> are part of a global trend of tabloid cloaking ads, where “fake news” ads are used as clickbait to link to unrelated products. This is not specific to <country> - we have seen tabloid cloaking ads featuring personalities from Australia, Europe and the US, amongst others, and are actively mitigating this global issue. The specific combination of Misrepresentation and Cloaking poses particular challenges, technically speaking, to our enforcement. Furthermore, abuse in online ads is a complex and ever-changing space. Fraudsters are constantly evolving, adapting, and trying to outsmart our systems and game the review process. Their ads are using increasingly new and sophisticated methods to circumvent our enforcement systems. These include text and image manipulation.
We believe that the combination of automation and human review is the best approach to ensure that we can strike the best outcomes in a scalable manner. We are constantly evolving and improving our technology and processes to ensure that bad actors (who are in turn constantly evolving with new techniques) can be identified and actioned on in a timely manner. While our systems catch the majority of bad ads before they serve, similar ads may appear because attackers change their practices often to avoid being detected. Our systems get better over time as they learn more about the patterns of abuse.
We are unable to guarantee that this won't happen again – fraudsters are always finding new ways to circumvent our systems – but we’re working hard to strengthen our mechanisms based on their escalation.
Confirmed Click
Confirmed Click is applied when a Google Ads system determines that the ads on the impacted sites are generating unintended clicks. This creates a poor user experience because the user ends up on advertiser landing pages instead of their intended content.
By introducing the second click, we improve the experience by letting the user confirm their intent to visit the advertised page. Typically, users that intended to click on the ad will still click through to view the ad.
Visit the Policy center in your account and check the "Status" column. The Policy center displays all of the issues that may affect ad serving on your site or app including Confirmed Click.
Confirmed Click is automatically lifted when Google Ads no longer detects ongoing accidental clicks. However, this does not happen immediately. Confirmed Click will be automatically removed when Google Ads detects a sustained improvement in the click quality of users interacting with the ad on your content.
By understanding what causes users to click accidentally on ads, you'll be able to minimize the occurrence of this happening and have more accurate reporting information and a better user experience.
Remember to be careful when placing links, play buttons, download buttons, navigation buttons (for example, “Previous" or “Next"), game windows, video players, down arrows, or applications near ads because they might lead to accidental clicks.
Implementation examples you should review for, include but are not limited to:
- Ads close to navigational elements.
- Navigational elements overlaid on display ads.
- Buttons on top of or close to ads.
- Site content on top of or close to ads.
- Reflow of site content causing confusion.
- Any violations of the ad placement policies
- Add padding on the top and bottom of ad slots, especially on in-feed or in-article ads and sticky ads.
- Clearly label ads.
- Declare sticky ads.
- Move ads away from navigational buttons, such as next buttons, or clickable content on sites.
- Fix the size of the ad unit container especially on in-article ads, so it doesn't push your site’s content out of the way when it loads.
- Improve your site’s page speed. Remember, poor page speed can cause ads to delay in loading and appear unexpectedly to users as they scroll through your site.
- Test your site’s page speed with our Page Speed Insights tool.
- Get personalized recommendations for improving page speed with the Lighthouse tool.
- Run the Ad Speed report to identify which ad slots are loading more slowly and improve latency across your network.
First you should identify which ad slots are causing a bad user experience for users by reviewing the disallowed and recommended implementations above. Focus on improving ad unit implementation and page loading speed to improve users’ experience and minimise accidental clicks.
There are no manual reviews. Google Ads automatically applies Confirmed Click when Google Ads’ ad placements exhibit signs of generating accidental clicks. There is no need to appeal; instead, Confirmed Click is automatically lifted when Google Ads no longer detect ongoing accidental clicks.
Reflow happens when the browser has to recalculate the positions and dimensions of web elements and leads to re-rendering part or all of the webpage. For example if an ad is loaded into the visible viewport of the page, elements that are currently loaded will be pushed down to accommodate the ad. During this time, your site's visitors intending on interacting with your site may inadvertently click on the ad.
Many factors determine the performance of an ad including CTR, CPC, user intent, advertiser ROI and others. Lower CTR doesn’t mean lower long-term revenue. This change will improve the overall user experience of your site while minimising any unintended clicks. In the end, this will lead to happier users and better ad performance. CTR is certainly an important signal, but maximising post-click activity is in the best interest of everyone.
Our system has determined that the image ads on the impacted sites were generating unintended clicks. This creates a poor user experience because the users end up on advertiser landing pages instead of their intended content. By introducing the second click, we improve the experience by letting the user confirm their intent to visit the advertised page.
Google Ads measures click quality based on many factors. Certain content, layouts and placements can lead to lower quality clicks. Google Ads identifies those scenarios and changes the behaviour of the image ads to improve quality.
Google Ads considers data from across a prolonged period. Only when the system notices a sustained improvement in the overall click quality will Confirmed Click get disabled and removed from your account.
No, Confirmed Click will not impact any third party demand sources. Confirmed Click is only added to ads from Google Ads demand.
Earnings Deductions
Your earnings were deducted either for invalid activity or for activity that was not in compliance with Google policies. Google periodically reviews publisher accounts for such activity. When we find such activity in your account, we adjust your earnings and reimburse the advertisers who paid for these clicks and impressions.
In rare cases, your earnings were deducted because we could not collect payments from certain advertisers. For example, these advertisers may have used stolen credit cards or otherwise defaulted on payments. When this happens, we have to deduct the related revenue from publishers on whose content those advertisers’ ads appeared.
No, deductions can't be appealed. Please be assured that we have applied due diligence in reviewing the traffic in your account. As mentioned, a deduction is issued when we find invalid activity in your account, when we find activity that's not in compliance with Google policy, or when advertisers who default on payments to Google have served ads on your content.
Please note, fraudulent advertiser accounts that we catch are suspended indefinitely and are no longer permitted to run ads on Google's network.
The estimated earnings you see in your account give you a close estimate of recent account activity as and when traffic is accrued in your account. The finalized earnings on the other hand include all revenue you'll be paid for validated clicks and impressions minus revenue from advertisers who default on payments to Google and whose ads were served on your content.
On some occasions, Google may notice that activity you've already been paid for is invalid or not in compliance with Google policy. In such cases, Google posts an adjustment to your account in the form of a deduction. Find out more about estimated vs finalized earnings.
We're unable to provide the date range for which your adjustment was issued. Note that per our Terms and Conditions, we credit advertisers for invalid traffic accrued 60 days prior to the date of invoice. Once we complete our investigation and begin processing the credit, it may take up to 30 days for the deductions to appear in your account.
To maintain the integrity of our invalid activity detection system and to prevent users from circumventing the system, we aren’t able to provide details on what activity we noticed in your account.
We encourage publishers to continuously monitor their accounts for potential signs of invalid activity.
It's important for you to know where your traffic comes from. We understand the need to have ad campaigns to promote your apps or other content, but it's equally important to monitor what kind of traffic these promotions generate. To do this successfully we recommend monitoring the traffic driven to your apps or other content using an analytics tool like Firebase.
Additionally, for apps, we also recommend that you review the AdMob implementation guidance. Mobile phones have limited screen size, which means that careful planning for your ad placement is especially important. AdMob publishers should carefully implement ads to provide good user experiences and avoid accidental clicks.
Please note that Google works diligently to ensure that deductions due to advertiser payment fraud are rare in order to maintain a safe ecosystem for users, publishers, and advertisers. Fraudulent advertiser accounts that are caught are suspended indefinitely and are no longer permitted to run ads on Google's network.
Invalid Activity
The definitive FAQs for AdSpam - go/adspam-faqs. Updated quarterly based on your input!
Although publishers are not permitted to click on their own ads for any reason, we do understand that accidental clicks may occur. We therefore don't require that you contact us every time you click on your ads. Rest assured that your account is being properly credited for all clicks and impressions we consider to be valid.
If you suspect that invalid activity may have resulted from a visitor to your app, we suggest that you review your app's logs for any suspicious activity and notify us with your findings. This information can help us in resolving any issues, although as outlined in our Terms and Conditions, Google will use its sole discretion when determining instances of invalid activity.
You may also wish to review our tips and guidelines for keeping your account in good standing.
Lastly, please note that we'll monitor your situation closely, and that your account is being properly credited for all clicks and impressions we consider to be valid.
Yes, you're welcome to view your own app without generating invalid impressions. Simply viewing your app yourself will not jeopardize your account’s good standing. However, please continue to avoid clicking on any ads, and don't reload your screen excessively. We take the issue of invalid clicks and impressions very seriously and have a dedicated team of specialists and automated systems to flag and review any unusual activity.
We understand that your app traffic may significantly increase for various reasons, and that you may feel you ought to let us know. However, there's no need to notify us of a surge in activity, as we continually monitor all clicks and impressions on Google ads to prevent any abuse of the program. We'll monitor your situation closely, and your account is being properly credited for all clicks and impressions we consider to be valid.
It could be that your account has some clicks or impressions which our monitoring system considers to be invalid. As you may know, to protect the interests of our publishers and those of our advertisers, Google monitors clicks on Google ads to prevent any abuse of the program. Google's proprietary technology analyzes all ad clicks for any invalid activity that is intended to artificially drive up an advertiser's clicks or a publisher's earnings. Clicks deemed by our monitoring system to be invalid will appear in your reports.
Publishers don't receive any revenue for invalid clicks, so you may occasionally notice clicks with no associated revenue. Note that your account is being properly credited for all clicks we consider to be valid.
You're welcome to view the videos of ads on your app by clicking the play button. Clicks on the play button are not counted as clicks in your reports. We only count clicks that lead a user to the advertiser's site, including on the display URL or on the video while it's playing.
Policy Center
You’ll need to request a review of your site before the enforcement can be removed. Follow the steps for requesting a review.
Not necessarily. The Policy center shows sites that our review processes detected as violating one or more Program policies. While we’re constantly working to improve those processes, they can't detect every issue. We may notify you outside the Policy center if we detect an issue through other means.
No. The Policy center shows violating sites that have generated ad requests in the last 7-10 days. Certain sites (for example, those with very low daily traffic) will not appear in the Policy center. You're responsible for ensuring that your sites comply with our Program policies at all times. We suggest that you regularly check your sites for compliance.
User-generated Content
For your app or site, user-generated content is content that users contribute towards any app or site, visible to at least a subset of other users of your app or site. User-generated content can include text, comments, images, video, profiles, usernames, votes, likes, hearts, or other media, for example. Ads are not considered user-generated content, unless they contain embedded social media. Learn more about ugc and some best practices for managing it here.
As a publisher, you are responsible for ensuring that all user-generated content on your site or app complies with all applicable Program policies. Practically, this means that to participate in AdSense and/or AdMob you need to ensure that, on pages where your ad code appears, all content, including user-generated content, complies with all applicable Program policies.
Unlike the rest of your content, which is likely created directly under your guidance and supervision, user-generated content is submitted by users who operate independently of your site or app. Unfortunately, not everyone on the Internet is polite and well-mannered. Because users can post anything, you, as a publisher, need to be prepared to ensure that what they do post complies with all applicable Program policies.