17 Apr 2026 Search

Previously: Google Ads Shitshow Report 2024

It’s Google Ads Safety Report {PDF) time for all who celebrate, and, excuse me, but yikes.

The report is down to three pages from the six they put out last year, and this time it’s mostly a Google Gemini fan post. (Yes, the same LLM that’s behind the 91% right AI Overviews feature.)

I’m going to repeat the point I had last time: if a company is trying to brag on exposing people to less bad stuff, and they’re reporting the amount of bad stuff they blocked, they’re losing. When you ask how many rat turds are in the chocolate chip cookies, and the answer is “we swept up 99 million rat turds at the bakery last year!” that doesn’t make you want a cookie any more.

Look at your spam folder some time. A lot of stuff in there that’s obviously going to get blocked, because lots of people who are bad at doing crimes on the Internet try to do crimes on the Internet (maybe they bought a software package or training course that doesn’t work). The number blocked is always going to be high and not a good indication of the actual safety level. The meaningful metrics to report are on how much of the bad stuff got through—which Google never puts in these reports, because they let a lot through. By design. Features of Google’s ad system, such as Ads Transparency Center and the trademark policy, are set up to give an advantage to deceptive advertisers.

So, the numbers aren’t that helpful, but let’s compare to the 2024 report (PDF) anyway.

2024: 5.1 billion ads removed, 9.1 billion restricted

2025: 8.3 billion blocked or removed, 4.8 billion restricted

So if you add it up, they caught 14.2 billion in 2024 and 13.1 billion in 2025.

Are people really making 1.1 billion fewer policy-violating ads? If the number being made were going down, then why do legit small businesses keep getting priced out, as seems to have been the case in 2025?

2024: 39.2M+ advertiser accounts suspended.

2025: 24.9M+ advertiser accounts suspended.

What about bad sites? In 2024, Google took “site-level enforcement action” against 220,000 publisher sites. Update: there is a “publisher sites actioned” number for 2025, which is at “245k+”.

Pages are probably hard to compare across years, since it has gotten so much easier to vibe CMS a normal-looking article page. So I would expect more. But:

2024: 1.3 billion pages taken action against

2025: 480 million plus

Google’s biggest problem still seems to be sending people to malware from search. There is a “Malware or Unwanted Software” number for 2025, which is at “2M+”

For 2024, “Malicious or unwanted software” was at 19.3M.

Are malware operators really cutting back on Google Search campaigns, or is Google just catching fewer of them? A real “Ad Safety Report” would check in with security firms to see if their customers are getting more or fewer malware installs from search.

But even on the numbers that are easiest to make Google look good on, they’re not doing so well year to year. That’s not a surprise—safety is losing a game that wasn’t designed for safety to start with.

Anyway, if you are keeping a file on why your household or workplace has ad blocking set up to protect people from Google ads, save both PDFs along with the FBI alert.

(And yes, from the state legislature point of view, this is a good reason why we need working Right to Know: inquiring minds (have a right to) know)