Last Updated on September 8, 2026
Most advertisers check the wrong box. They open Google Ads, see “Approved” next to every ad, and conclude the campaign is working. Spend goes out. Impressions stay thin. So they blame the budget, the keywords, or the agency.
There is now a third possibility, and Google has written it down.
What Google actually changed
Google has been widening a policy called Limited ad serving. In June 2026 it extended the policy to cover Google Search. On 5 August 2026 it went further, updating the policy “to cover all Google Ads”, which brings YouTube, Gmail, the Play Store and Discover into scope alongside Search.
This is not switching on overnight. Google’s own wording is that “implementation will begin gradually and will be completed by 2028”.
Here is the part that matters. When Google decides an advertiser is not qualified, it does not reject the ads. It limits how often they are shown. The policy page is explicit: “Individual ads will not be disapproved.”
Your account stays green. Your ads stay approved. They simply stop appearing on the searches you care about.
The short version: an approved ad and a serving ad are not the same thing. Google can leave your ads live and quietly reduce how often they show, and the only warning is a notification inside your account.
The mistake this exposes
Businesses audit their advertising for errors. Disapprovals, broken links, failed payments, wrong landing pages. Those are visible, so they get fixed.
Nobody audits for silence.
If your ads are approved and your impressions are low, the default assumption is that you are being outbid. Sometimes you are, and our figures on what UK businesses actually pay per click show how quickly that gets expensive. But an impression limit produces exactly the same symptom for a completely different reason, and no amount of raising your bid will fix it.
Who Google says gets limited
Google lists the signals it uses to decide whether an advertiser is qualified. They are worth reading slowly.
| Signal Google names | What that means in practice |
|---|---|
| Account maturity | A brand new ad account starts with no track record. |
| Advertiser verification status | Whether you have completed Google’s identity checks. |
| User activity and reports | Google says it takes repeated user complaints especially seriously. |
| History of policy compliance | Old disapprovals you thought were behind you. |
| Ad format usage | Which formats you run and how you use them. |
| Advertiser industry | Some sectors carry more scrutiny than others. |
Read that list as a description of a business rather than a policy, and a shape appears. A new account. Verification never completed. Generic ad copy. A brand nobody has heard of yet.
Google does not say the policy targets small advertisers, and it should not be read that way. Its stated purpose is to reduce bad ad experiences. But the signals it has chosen reward age, verification and a recognisable name, and a business that has none of those three starts from behind.
What Google says to do about it
The remedies on Google’s page are unglamorous, which is the point. For Search, it recommends completing advertiser verification, keeping your own branding clear in both the ad and the landing page, avoiding generic ad copy, and pinning your domain to the first position of your headline, especially if you are new or your brand is not well known.
Google’s own summary is blunt: “You’re required to build trust to become a qualified advertiser.”
If you are limited, you get an in-account notification and can appeal through Google’s Limited Ad Serving Appeals Form. On how long reinstatement takes, Google says: “Unfortunately, we can’t say how long this might take.” Plan on the assumption that prevention is cheaper than appeal.
Three checks worth doing this week
1. Complete advertiser verification. It is the one signal on Google’s list you can fix outright, in an afternoon, for nothing.
2. Put your business name in the ad and on the landing page. If a stranger cannot tell who is advertising within two seconds, Google’s systems have the same problem.
3. Read your notifications. Not the email digest. The bell inside the account. That is where a serving limit shows up, and it is the only place it does.
There is a timing point here too. Google is already rewriting campaign settings across accounts this month. If your impressions move in September, you now have two candidate explanations rather than one, and you will need the notification history to tell them apart.
The takeaway
Approved is not the same as serving. That single distinction is worth more than any bid adjustment you will make this quarter.
The businesses that lose money here will not lose it to a rejection they can see. They will lose it to a limit they never noticed, on an account that looked healthy the whole time. That is the expensive kind of waste, and it is the same pattern behind most of what UK businesses buy and never benefit from.
Verify the account before you raise the budget. Trust is now a line item, and Google has told you exactly how it is scored.
