Ad Grant policy is not static. Rules get added, thresholds move, and enforcement tightens on rules that were always there but rarely checked. Most accounts that fall out of compliance did not break a new rule — they kept doing something that stopped being tolerated.
Where the changes actually appear
There is no single announcement feed, which is the root of the problem. Changes surface in four places, in roughly this order:
- The Ad Grants policy pages in Google's own help centre. This is the authoritative text. It gets edited quietly — the wording changes and nothing announces it.
- Email to the account contact. Significant changes are emailed, to the address on file. Which is why the address on file matters more than it looks.
- In-account notifications in Google Ads, which are easy to dismiss and impossible to retrieve.
- Enforcement. The worst way to learn: an account gets flagged for something that was fine last quarter.
Treat the help centre text as the source of truth, not a blog post. That includes this one. Anything you read about Ad Grant policy — here, on a forum, from an agency — should be checked against Google's current page before you act on it. Policy articles age badly, and the internet is full of confident advice about rules that changed years ago.
What has historically changed, and what has not
Some parts of the programme have been stable for years and are unlikely to move: the $10,000 monthly value, the requirement to own your domain, the ban on advertising networks on your site, and the requirement that ads point to your own domain.
The parts that have moved, and could again, are the numeric thresholds and the structural minimums — click-through rate floors, quality score requirements, minimum counts of ad groups and extensions, and the bidding rules around the manual bid cap. If you have a number in your head from a training deck, that is exactly the sort of thing worth re-checking.
A review routine that actually works
Quarterly, thirty minutes:
- Open Google's Ad Grants policy page and read it. Not skim — read. It is short.
- Compare each numeric threshold against what your account is actually doing.
- Check the account's notification history in Google Ads for anything dismissed.
- Confirm the contact email still reaches a monitored inbox.
- Re-run the policy checklist against the current wording rather than from memory.
Four times a year is enough. The failure mode is not moving too slowly on a policy change — it is going three years without reading the policy at all.
Build for the spirit, not the threshold
The most useful protection against policy change is not vigilance. It is building the account so that the rules are irrelevant to it.
Every Ad Grant rule is a proxy for one idea: the ads should be relevant to what people searched, and the grant should serve the mission. An account with tight ad groups, specific keywords, geography that matches the service area and real conversion tracking passes the current rules comfortably — and would pass a stricter version of them too.
An account built to sit exactly on each threshold is one policy revision away from a problem. If your click-through rate hovers at 5.2%, a tightening to 6% is a crisis. If it sits at 11% because the structure is right, you would not notice.
When a change does affect you
Act in the month you learn about it, not at the next review. Google typically gives notice before enforcing, and the notice period is the cheapest time to comply — remediating under a deactivation is the same work with worse consequences and a reinstatement attached.
The short version
Read the policy page quarterly. Keep the contact email alive. Do not trust numbers from memory or from articles. And build the account so it clears the rules by a wide margin, because that is the only strategy that survives a rule you have not read yet.