Google reviews your website before approving an Ad Grant, and the website is where most applications fail. There are five pages a reviewer expects to find, plus a handful of technical conditions. All of it is fixable in about a week, and all of it makes the site better regardless of the grant.
The five pages
1. Mission or about
What the organisation does, who it serves, and why it exists. A reviewer should understand your purpose in under thirty seconds. Include the legal name and registration number somewhere — it lets a reviewer tie the site to the verified entity without hunting.
2. Programmes or services
What you actually deliver. Not aspirations — the specific things a person could receive or take part in. This is also the page that later gives your campaigns their structure, because each programme tends to map to a campaign.
3. Donate
A real donation route, on your own domain. Linking out to a platform is fine, but the page the ad reaches must be yours. Say what a gift funds — the same sentence that satisfies a reviewer also raises conversion rate.
4. Privacy policy
Most commonly missing. It needs to describe what data you collect, why, how long you keep it, and how someone contacts you about it. If you run analytics or ads, say so. A generic template is acceptable; no page at all is not.
5. Contact
A real way to reach a human — email address or form, plus a physical or registered address. A social media link alone does not count.
Thin versions of all five still fail. Five pages of one paragraph each is a thin site with more navigation. Reviewers are assessing whether a visitor would find the site useful, not counting URLs.
The technical conditions
| Requirement | How to check |
|---|---|
| HTTPS on every page | Browse the site and watch for mixed-content warnings |
| You own the domain | Not a fiscal sponsor's site, a Facebook page, or a free subdomain |
| No advertising networks | Search source for adsbygoogle and
googlesyndication |
| No affiliate links | Check the blog and any resource pages |
| No broken links | Run any free link checker across the site |
| Works on a phone | Open it on an actual phone, not a resized window |
Substantial content
The vaguest requirement and the one worth taking seriously. A site is substantial when a visitor could spend ten minutes on it and come away informed. In practice: the five pages above, plus enough depth that each one says something specific.
If you are short, the fastest honest additions are an impact or annual report page, a page per major programme rather than one combined page, and answers to the questions people actually ask you. All three are useful to visitors, which is the point.
What is allowed that people assume is not
- Selling things, where it serves the mission — tickets, adoption fees, course fees, a shop. See commercial activity rules.
- Corporate sponsor logos. Acknowledging a supporter is not advertising.
- A donation platform on another domain, as long as the ad points at your page first.
- A blog, provided it carries no affiliate links or ads.
The one-week plan
- Day 1. Audit against the five pages and the technical table. Write down what is missing.
- Day 2. Fix HTTPS if needed, and strip every ad or affiliate link.
- Days 3–4. Write the missing pages properly.
- Day 5. Fix broken links, check on a phone, read every page as a stranger.
- Day 6. Leave it. Come back and read it once more.
- Day 7. Apply, or reapply.
The rest of the application is in applying step by step, and what rejection wording means is in why applications get rejected.