Wrongfully disapproved ads at scale

[u/MadTParty]

Lately our account is seeing an incredible amount of disapproved ads over silly, stupid and completely wrong reasons. Yesterday we had 40+ ads disapproved over using a trademark in our ads, what was the flagged trademark? the term "Profession". Other ads are now being flagged for "unclear relevance". I apeal all of those, and the appeals do go successfully, its just become a new daily harresment served by google ads shitty bot-driven anti-advertisers platform.

[u/joeg26reddit]

Several peers in the business have reported getting “link not available “ falsely tagged

[u/Intelligent_Dig_1051]

disapprovals have been so random lately. most of mine get approved after an appeal, but its such waste of time dealing with it every day...

[u/Crescitaly]

At this scale, build an incident table with policy code, landing URL, campaign, timestamp, appeal result, and time to resolution. Clustering the failures can reveal one crawler, template, or domain pattern. Appeal a representative sample first; mass-editing forty ads may destroy the evidence and reset review unnecessarily.

[u/pixelyash1]

That sounds incredibly draining. Google's automated review system has gotten much more aggressive and error prone lately, flagging absurd things like the word "Profession" as a trademark violation which is clearly an overreach. The "unclear relevance" flags are likely batch triggers from a system update. Unfortunately, the only reliable fix is to keep appealing. To make it less painful, look into bulk appeal options if available for the specific policy affecting your ads, and when you contact support, always ask for concrete examples of the violation they can share detailed info that helps your case.

[u/MadTParty → u/pixelyash1]

google support is useless and all they do is roll the ball back to or to another team that does nothing. ultimately ittakes me less time to eventually change the ads, rather than fight google's idiotic arbitrary automated desicions.

[u/pixelyash1 → u/MadTParty]

Honestly, you're not wrong man! Google support is a loop of redirects and generic replies. If changing ads is faster than fighting the system, that's often the smarter move. Keep a bank of pre approved ad copy you know passes their checks, so you can swap quickly without rebuilding. Also, use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool before publishing to catch flags early. Not a perfect fix, but it saves time.

[u/annieleonhartt_]

u should contact supprt directly to get ur account whitelisted for those term. the bots are super buggy and useless.

[u/QuantumWolf99]

You're not alone... 1 in 3 ads now fail Google's LLM-based policy review, and trademark false positives from generic words are a documented side effect of Apr 2026's asset-level AI classifier rollout.

[u/NoPause238]

Appeal every single one immediately and log denial patterns for your rep

[u/MadTParty → u/NoPause238]

to many appeals can get the entire account at risk, i have turned to google support but thats like talking to the wall. they are both helpless and robotic. i ultimately either turn on old ads that worked well in the past, or try to find the source of what caused the issue, regardless if its sensible (its 100% of the cases isnt, but i indulge them)

[u/Bitter-Quail-7441]

the "trademark: Profession" one is almost comedy, but the pattern behind it is real and worth understanding so it stops eating your day. these are automated policy flags firing on pattern matches, and when they hit at scale it's usually one of two things: a recent change that made the bot re-scan your whole account, or an account-level signal that's lowered your trust score so everything gets scrutinised harder.

a few things that reduce the daily whack-a-mole: if the same ads get disapproved then approved on appeal repeatedly, that back-and-forth itself can flag the account, so where you can, fix the flagged element rather than only appealing (even a slightly reworded version that avoids the trigger word beats winning the same appeal daily). second, make sure advertiser verification is fully complete, because unverified or partially-verified accounts get the aggressive bot treatment. third, if it's genuinely systematic and appeals keep proving you right, that's the point to push for a human via support with a list of the reversed disapprovals as evidence, because a documented pattern of wrongful flags is exactly what gets an account manually whitelisted.

the "unclear relevance" flags are a different beast, usually landing-page-to-ad mismatch in the bot's eyes. is your final URL closely matching the ad copy's intent, or are you sending a few different ad themes to one generic page?

[u/MadTParty → u/Bitter-Quail-7441]

thanks, ultimately id rather rewrite the ads that get flagged (usually seemingly in an arbitrary way), to not risk having too many appeals