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  • No Restriction: All ad serving features are active, including personalised targeting, assuming user consent has been granted.
  • Personalisation Disabled: This setting turns off ad personalisation, but other forms of data collection or tracking might still occur.
  • Non-Personalised Ads: Ads are displayed based on the content or the user’s current session info only, without using historical data or profiles for targeting.
  • Limited Ads: Ad serving is minimal, used when there’s no consent for personalised ads but some advertising is still legally permissible.
  • Basic Ads: Focuses on serving ads purely based on the immediate context or session, without any personalised targeting or user profiling.
  • Restricted Data Processing: This is mainly used to comply with regulations like the CCPA, limiting data processing to what’s legally required.
It restricts Google-served ads that fully or partially obscure content for any period of time
Fewer advertising sources will be eligible to bid on it, and in some cases, no ads will appear on your content. Google Ads advertisements will not serve on content labelled with these restrictions
‘Content’ includes both publisher content and ads. Therefore, ads obscuring other ads also violates the restriction
To maintain a healthy digital advertising ecosystem where users, advertisers, and publishers are protected and can trust the system. It is also to ensure ads are displayed in a user-friendly way
Avoid placing ads too close to publisher content that might lead to accidental clicks or ads overlapping content. Experiment with different ad placements and formats
Check the Policy Center in your account. If you are using our GAM, we will receive notification and communicate this with you as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, Google tend to be light on giving the details and typically it’s a case of trial and error to find the issue, remove it, and get things up and running again. We are unable to pinpoint reasons as they are simply not given, but we can work with you to help identify the issue. The restriction will have a timestamp of when it was raised so the first action will be to look at changes made on, or just prior to that time.
There are many reasons that Google will restrict inventory and sadly they don’t tend to offer a reason when placing these. However, some common reasons we see are:
  • Ads covering content that aren’t closeable
  • Ads covering other Ads that aren’t closeable
  • Ads on Mobile, taking more than 30% of the page
  • Ads encouraging accidental clicks: containing play buttons, Ads looking like additional content (menu / navigation bars etc), suggestions that the viewer click to support the website, content mimicking Ads in order to “blend” the Ad into the page
Without the details given for restriction, its a process of trial and error to solve the issue. If you have made recent changes or additions to the site this is the natural place to start. We recommend removing any units that clearly break the rules and resubmitting with Google. If the restrictions remain, suspend the most likely suspects in turn and resubmit until the culprit has been identified
  • Updates can change the algorithm, re-evaluating sites based on new criteria and potentially causing a previously well ranked site to drop. Google’s recent focus on Core Web Vitals can also affect a website’s ranking if not properly optimised
  • Google uses AI to scrape websites of the information, serving the headlines and top line details to a user meaning they no longer need to click through to your page.
  • Content is King: focus on high quality, engaging content to drive users to site
  • Ensure that your site works well on mobile to maximise traffic opportunities
  • Closely monitor Core Web Vitals and work to optimise website performance
  • Keep up-to-date with Google Updates and Best Practise to understand changes and be responsive