Ad policy & compliance checker

Almost nobody applying to AdSense is running prohibited content deliberately. The failures come from ordinary sites brushing against a category they did not think about. A gaming site covering weapons in detail. A health site making treatment claims. A deals site whose affiliate relationships are never stated. A news aggregator republishing other outlets' articles in full, which is a copyright problem before it is a content problem.

Images are the quietest one. Pictures pulled from search results, stock photography used outside its licence, and screenshots of other people's work republished without context all create intellectual-property exposure that nothing on the page announces. It is invisible to you and entirely visible to whoever owns the image.

The other blind spot is where traffic comes from. Bought traffic, incentivised clicks and exchange schemes are against the program rules regardless of how good the site is, and they are checked after approval rather than before, which makes them the expensive kind of mistake. If any part of your growth plan involves paying for visits that are not real interest, resolve that before the application rather than after.

The common shape of a failure here is a site that has all the right pages and none of the behaviour they describe. A privacy policy listing services the site does not use, alongside an ad network it does not mention. A consent banner that appears after the tracking scripts have already run. An affiliate disclosure on a dedicated page nobody reaches, rather than beside the links it applies to.

This matters because both AdSense and every privacy regulator assess the mechanism. A policy is evidence of what you claim to do; consent gating, disclosure placement and retention practice are what you actually do, and where they disagree the document works against you rather than for you.

The practical version is short. Every service that touches visitor data is named in the policy. Non-essential tags do not fire until consent is given. Disclosures sit next to what they disclose. The pages are linked from the footer of every page and revisited whenever you add a tool. That covers the ground this audit measures, and most of the ground a regulator would.

A deals blog, sixty pages, preparing to apply for AdSense, is the site where this audit earns its keep, so here is what it typically finds there. Finding one: affiliate links throughout the content, with the only disclosure living on a dedicated /disclosure page that no reader passes on the way to a link. Disclosure has to be visible before the click it applies to, so the fix is a one-line notice at the top of every money page, plus keeping the dedicated page for the long version. An afternoon, mostly in the template.

Finding two: product descriptions copied verbatim from merchant data feeds. That reads as aggregated content with no editorial work, and it is also an intellectual-property question, since the text belongs to the merchants. The fix is the expensive one on this list: the descriptions get replaced with what the site actually knows, which deals were genuinely good, what arrived when one was ordered, which merchant honoured a price error. That is also the work that separates the site from every other feed republisher, so it pays twice.

Findings three and four are mechanical. The consent banner is present and the tags fire before it, the near-universal gating failure, fixed by routing the tags through the consent platform rather than pasting them into the head. And a newsletter modal covers the first pageview, which reads as an intrusive interstitial; moved to trigger on scroll depth or exit intent, it collects almost as many addresses and stops standing between the visitor and the first paragraph.

Notice what the list does not contain: a single judgement about writing quality. All four findings are mechanisms, which is the general character of policy failures, they are binary, they are checkable, and they are fixable in days rather than months. Once they are cleared, the policy substance and the content itself are what remain, and the full audit is the right tool for that second question, since it weighs this category alongside everything else the review considers.