Google updated its gambling ads policy three times in 2026, each change shifting risk further up the chain: from individual ads to accounts to the manager accounts that oversee them.
On March 23, accounts seeking online gambling certification had to demonstrate 'good policy health' — a compliance record free of violations and revoked certificates. Manager accounts with significant volumes of revoked gambling certificates among their clients, or with clients repeatedly caught violating policy, lost the ability to apply for new gambling certificates and had existing ones revoked.
August 26 brought stricter application standards. Advertisers now need a valid local license for every region they target, with documentation proving the link between the advertiser, the licensed entity and the domain. One Google Ads account can no longer hold both an online gambling certificate and a social casino certificate. Affiliates and aggregators must link only to operators licensed in their targeted region and display a footer statement confirming this on their advertised domain.
On September 14, good policy health requirements extended to every gambling and games category. The manager account rule tightened further: repeated certificate revocations or managed accounts repeatedly flagged for violations can cost the manager account its eligibility for new online gambling certificates and may result in existing ones being revoked.
Google does not publish the exact criteria for policy health. In practice it means no open violations, no pattern of disapprovals and no history of revoked certificates in your account or anywhere above it in the management chain.
Domain ownership matters more now. Certification is not available for sites on free hosting, subdomains of third-party hosts, domains with no gambling connection, or second-level domains the advertiser does not own and operate. If a partner, white-label provider or former agency registered the domain, the advertiser may be promoting a site it does not legally control.
For agencies, the restructured policy changes the economics. Before 2026, a problem client mostly harmed itself. Now a manager account works like a shared bank account with a joint credit rating: enough bad behaviour from a few clients, and everyone under the same manager account pays. The sensible move is to keep clients with strong compliance records separate from new or riskier ones. Google stopped accepting appeals for policy decisions older than six months in July 2026, so delays narrow the options for fixing problems.
