The AdSense application checklist, by what actually gets refused

Most checklists for this are the same twenty bullet points in a different order, and they treat every item as equally important. They are not. Some of these end an application on the spot and no amount of writing fixes them. Others delay one, and a fortnight of work clears them.

Sorting by that distinction is the only thing that makes a checklist useful, so that is how this one is arranged.

Two passes, not one list

The first pass asks whether the site is eligible at all: does it work, is the content yours, is any of it prohibited, are the required pages present. A failure here is a refusal, and reapplying without fixing it wastes another review cycle.

The second pass is a judgement about quality and usefulness. This is where thin pages, a small site, or a missing author bio live. These are weighed. They can produce a refusal on their own, but they are also the things that improve fastest, and a site refused on the second pass is usually close.

Confusing the two is why people spend a month adding articles to a site that was refused for a missing privacy policy.

Pass one: the things that refuse outright

Check	What is looked for	Where it fails
Site functions	No error pages, no template demo content, navigation works	Under construction, broken build
Original content	Written for this site, not syndicated or scraped	Republished feeds, spun articles
Prohibited content	Adult, hateful, dangerous, pirated, misrepresentative	Any of it, anywhere on the site
Privacy policy	Present, reachable, describing real collection	Missing, or a template with placeholders
Traffic sources	Organic and direct, not purchased or incentivised	Bought traffic, click exchanges
Site ownership	You control the domain and can add code to it	Free subdomains you cannot edit

The privacy policy row is the one that catches ordinary, honest sites. It is required where you serve ads to visitors whose data gets processed, and a generated one that still says [YOUR COMPANY] reads worse than none. The essential pages checker finds these by meaning rather than URL, so it works whatever language the site is in and whatever the pages are called.

Pass two: the things that are weighed

Check	The rule applied	Fix time
Page depth	Visible text per page, after navigation and footer are stripped	Days
Site size	Enough pages to judge, no published number	Weeks
Duplication	Pages substantially the same as each other	Hours
Publishing pattern	Evidence the site is maintained, not abandoned	Ongoing
Author and trust signals	Who wrote this, and can they be contacted	An afternoon
Ad layout	Ads distinguishable from content, not obscuring it	An afternoon
Mobile rendering	The phone layout carries the same content as desktop	Varies
Page speed	Slow enough to hurt usability, not a hard threshold	Varies

Thin pages are the most common single item here, and the most misunderstood, because word counts from a CMS include the furniture that gets stripped before anyone counts. What low value content actually means goes through that in detail; the thin content checker gives you the per-page numbers.

Duplication is the fastest win on this table, because most of it is one article at several addresses rather than anything you wrote twice, and it is usually fixed in one template change.

The technical layer nobody mentions

None of the standard checklists include these, and all of them can sink an application by making the site look broken to the reviewer's crawler rather than to a person.

• Ad crawler blocked in robots.txt. Search is unaffected, so nothing looks wrong. The robots.txt lines that cause it are worth ten minutes.
• Soft 404s. Missing pages returning 200 get indexed as near-identical thin pages, which is a content problem created by a configuration mistake. How to spot them.
• Broken internal links, which waste crawl budget every pass. The broken links checker samples them live rather than only parsing them.
• Certificate about to expire, which turns the whole site into a warning screen on the day it lapses. The SSL checker reports days remaining.

Running it

Every item above corresponds to a check we run, and the thresholds are published on the tool pages rather than described vaguely, because a checklist that says "make pages long enough" is not a checklist. The full AdSense audit runs all forty-five at once and separates the two passes in its report, and the policy and compliance audit runs just the first pass if that is the part you are unsure about.

If you are weighing this against the other free checkers, we compared them on the two things that decide whether a result is useful: how many pages they read, and whether they publish the threshold they applied.

One thing no tool can tell you, ours included: whether the content is worth reading. Google's program policies are explicit that originality and usefulness are the bar, and a site that clears every technical check and has nothing to say still gets refused. The checks remove the reasons that are not about the writing, so that the writing is what is left.