The following violations will result in a 'strike' and can affect an account’s Restricted Access Features (RAFs) eligibility:
- Any five (5) RAF in-scope policy violations, or:
- Any single RAF in-scope policy violation that is deemed egregious. Egregious violations exhibit one or more of the following characteristics:
- Significant scale of impact.
- A notable failure to adhere to best practices or implementation guidance, whether intentional or due to neglect.
- Particularly deceptive or misleading to users or to Google.
- Directly attributable to advertiser harm.
Strike incidents are documented for a two-year duration following the most recent reported strike.
Disallowed behaviours and examples
| Disallowed behaviours leading to policy violations | Normal example
(5 policy violations = 1 strike) |
Egregious example
(1 egregious policy violation = 1 strike) |
|---|---|---|
| Acquiring traffic from non-compliant sources
For more information on best practices for acquiring traffic, refer to Related Search for your content pages. |
Promises are made but not clear or explicit, such as:
Specific information is promised (but not tangible gifts/offers), such as:
|
Concrete and explicitly stated impossible to fulfil promises. Examples include, but are not limited to:
|
| Displaying more search ads than search results | Some organic results are available, but there are more ads than organics. |
|
| Placing Product-Integrated Feature (PIF) or Related Search for content units in a manner that encourages accidental clicks or relies on deceptive implementation |
Cases where there may be content on the page but it provides little alternative value to the related search unit, such as:
|
The PIF or related search unit is the obvious focal point of the page and is positioned in a manner that draws unnatural attention or encourages accidental clicks, such as:
|
Inaccurate declaration of the referrerAdCreative (RAC) parameter |
The general meaning is still captured, without any key details missing, such as: Real upstream ad creative served to users:
|
Key details are omitted or misrepresented, in a way that meaningfully alters Google’s understanding of the true upstream ad creative, such as: Real upstream ad creative served to users:
Real upstream ad creative served to users:
|
