Ad policy & compliance checker
11 policy checks, prohibited content, GDPR/CCPA, cookie consent, DMCA, disclosures and ad placement.
What TMOD checks
- AdSense program policy violations and prohibited content categories, read by an AI reviewer in any language rather than matched against an English keyword list.
- Privacy policy presence and content, tested for GDPR and CCPA vocabulary rather than just a page existing at /privacy.
- Cookie consent implementation, detected heuristically from known consent platforms first and confirmed by the AI reviewer when the heuristic is inconclusive.
- Terms of service and DMCA pages, located by an AI classifier that recognises them in any language.
- Age-restricted content screening, affiliate and sponsored disclosure, intrusive pop-ups and interstitials, and ad density and placement balance.
- Copyright and intellectual-property risk across the crawled pages.
Every check, explained
11 checks run in this audit. 2 of them have a page of their own with the exact threshold and how to fix it.
Policy & compliance
Why it matters
Policy failures are the fastest route to rejection and the least negotiable. Content quality is a judgement call with a broad middle ground; a prohibited-content category or a missing privacy policy is a straightforward no, and no amount of good writing compensates.
Several of these are also legal requirements independent of AdSense. A site serving EU visitors needs a working consent mechanism and a GDPR-compliant privacy policy whether or not it runs ads, and the exposure there is considerably larger than a rejected application.
The checks that matter most are the ones people assume they have passed. Almost every site has a page at /privacy, far fewer have one that actually names what data is collected, who processes it, and how a visitor exercises their rights. We check for the substance, not the URL.
How to fix it
01Write a privacy policy that describes your actual site
A generic template that mentions services you do not use and omits the ones you do is a compliance problem, not a solution. Name the analytics, the ad networks, the embeds and the hosting. Say what is retained and for how long. If AdSense is the goal, it must disclose third-party ad cookies.
02Implement consent before the tags fire
A consent banner that appears while tracking scripts have already loaded does not comply with anything. Consent must gate the scripts. Most consent platforms support this properly; the common failure is installing the banner and never wiring it to the tag manager.
03Disclose affiliate and sponsored content clearly
The disclosure needs to be visible before the link, not buried in a footer or a separate page. This is both an AdSense expectation and, in most jurisdictions, a legal requirement with a regulator attached.
04Remove interstitials that block the first view
A full-screen overlay before a visitor can read anything is flagged as an intrusive interstitial. Consent notices and age gates where legally required are the exception; newsletter modals and app-install prompts on arrival are not.
The policies people trip over without meaning to
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.
Compliance is a mechanism, not a document
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.
Questions
I have a privacy policy but it is still flagged. Why?
The check reads the page, not just its existence. It looks for the vocabulary of an actual policy, what data is collected, the legal basis, third-party processors, retention periods, and how a visitor exercises their rights under GDPR or CCPA. A three-sentence page saying 'we respect your privacy' will be flagged, correctly.
Does this replace legal advice?
No, and it is not close. It checks for the presence and apparent substance of the documents and mechanisms that AdSense and the major privacy regimes expect. Whether your specific policy is adequate for your specific processing in your specific jurisdiction is a question for a lawyer. Treat a pass here as clearing a floor, not as compliance.
Why is my ad placement flagged when I do not run ads yet?
The ad placement and density checks look at the layout patterns that cause problems once ads are added, insufficient content between placements, layouts where an ad would land above the fold with nothing else, and elements that could be mistaken for content. On a site with no ads it is advisory, telling you where placements would be a problem later.
Does prohibited-content detection work in languages other than English?
Yes. The policy engines use an AI reviewer that reads content in any language rather than matching English keyword lists, which is why this preset includes the language-model pass. A keyword-based check on a non-English site produces almost no signal, which is worse than an honest 'we could not assess this'.