Why Your Ads Aren’t Showing (and How to Fix Eligibility Issues)

Someone on your team searches your brand on Google, expecting to see your carefully crafted ads front and center. Nothing shows. Budget looks fine, campaigns are active, yet traffic is flat. Before assuming “Google is broken,” it helps to know that the platform is enforcing billions of policies quietly in the background. According to the 2023 Google Ads Safety Report, Google blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, restricted over 6.9 billion ads, and suspended over 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly doubling its previous year’s enforcement. If your ads aren’t showing, there’s a good chance you’re bumping into that invisible safety and eligibility machinery.

The Difference Between “Not Showing” and “Not Eligible”

Before chasing ghosts in your account, it helps to separate two different problems: ads that are technically eligible but losing auctions, and ads that are blocked or heavily limited by policy or account issues. The first is a performance problem; the second is an eligibility problem. They look similar from the outside—no impressions, no clicks—but require completely different fixes.

The fastest way to get clarity is to stop searching for your own ads on Google and instead look at status signals inside your account. The “Status” column on campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords will usually tell whether something is “Eligible,” “Eligible (limited),” “Under review,” “Disapproved,” or “Removed.” If everything looks eligible yet impressions are tiny, you probably have a bid, budget, or relevance issue. If you see “Disapproved,” “Limited by policy,” or “Account suspended,” you are dealing with eligibility.

Another underused tool is the ad preview and diagnosis feature. Instead of manually searching your keywords and distorting performance data, this tool will show whether the ad is eligible for that query, in that location, on that device, and explain why or why not. When your ads are not showing, diagnosing eligibility with these built-in signals is the best starting point.

Understanding the nuances between these two issues can save you time and frustration. For instance, if your ads are not showing due to losing auctions, it could be a sign that your bids are too low compared to competitors or that your ad quality scores need improvement. Quality scores are influenced by several factors, including ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected click-through rate. Therefore, enhancing these elements can significantly boost your ad's performance in auctions, leading to more visibility and engagement.

On the other hand, if your ads are marked as disapproved or limited, it’s crucial to delve into the specific policy violations. Google has strict advertising guidelines, and even minor missteps can lead to disapproval. Common issues include using prohibited content, misleading claims, or not adhering to specific industry regulations. Familiarizing yourself with these policies can help you craft compliant ads from the start, reducing the likelihood of running into eligibility issues that can stall your advertising efforts.

Start With the Basics: Delivery Settings That Quietly Block You

Before diving into deep policy or account issues, many advertisers discover that their “eligibility problem” is actually a basic delivery setting. Campaigns can be perfectly compliant and still fail to show if targeting or budget decisions choke off impressions. This is both the easiest and the most overlooked layer to fix.

Location targeting is a common culprit. If your ads target a narrow radius, exclude overlapping locations, or are set to “Presence” in an area where much of your demand comes from commuters traveling through, the effective audience can shrink dramatically. Language settings can add another invisible filter when accounts default to a language that doesn’t match browser or device settings of your audience.

Budgets and bidding strategies also play a quiet but decisive role. A campaign on a limited daily budget combined with a high target CPA or ROAS strategy can cause Google’s system to serve cautiously, especially with newer campaigns. Paused or removed audiences, overly strict audience targeting, or an aggressive list of negative keywords can also create a situation where the system wants to show your ads but can’t find enough eligible queries. Checking these basics first often resolves “my ads never show” faster than any appeal or support ticket.

Policy Roadblocks: Why Google Quietly Limits or Blocks Ads

If the basics look clean, policy is usually the next layer to investigate. Google has steadily tightened ad safety and fraud controls, especially around scams, misrepresentation, and sensitive verticals. The scale of that enforcement is not small-according to the 2024 Google Ads Safety Report, Google blocked or removed 415 million ads and suspended over 5 million accounts for violating policies most closely associated with scams. With that level of filtering, it only takes a small misstep for a campaign to be throttled or blocked.

When an ad is affected by policy, it rarely just “does nothing.” Policy labels typically show up as “Disapproved,” “Eligible (limited),” or “Approved (limited)” with a reason: misrepresentation, restricted content, trademark, adult content, or similar. Many advertisers overlook the centralized Policy Manager, which aggregates all these issues across an account and shows how many ads are affected and why. Spending time here is often more valuable than tweaking ad copy blindly.

Misrepresentation, Scams, and Trust Signals

Google’s misrepresentation policies aim to protect users from misleading or harmful offers. That can include obvious scams, but also subtler issues: unclear pricing, missing business information, exaggerated claims, or landing pages that don’t match ad promises. Even if your business is legitimate, weak trust signals-no contact details, vague refund terms, or aggressive countdown timers-can trigger limited serving or disapprovals.

Eligibility problems also arise when accounts use bridge pages, affiliate-style landing pages, or boilerplate content from vendors. If several advertisers push nearly identical pages and claims, the systems may flag those patterns as risky even when individual advertisers feel they are playing by the rules. Strengthening transparency, clarifying your unique value, and aligning ad copy with precise landing page content can dramatically reduce these issues.

Sensitive Categories and Policy Changes

Some industries face stricter policy rules regardless of how well their campaigns are set up. Healthcare and medicines, financial services, political content, and gambling all live under extra scrutiny. Google continues to refine these rules; for example, in October 2025 it updated its healthcare and medicines policy to allow limited non-promotional use of prescription drug terms in ads-covering public health announcements and academic publications-while keeping promotional use tightly controlled, as reported by Search Engine Land’s coverage of the healthcare policy update.

For advertisers in or adjacent to these sensitive spaces, eligibility is less about “getting around” policy and more about designing campaigns that fit within what’s allowed. That often means working with legal and compliance teams on copy, ensuring proper disclaimers, and sometimes restructuring offers so they can be promoted at all. If your ads say one thing and your landing pages imply another, or if you lean on vague language in regulated niches, expect more frequent reviews and occasional abrupt pauses in delivery.

Account-Level Issues: Suspensions, Holds, and Verification

Eligibility isn’t just about ads and keywords. Account-level decisions can turn off delivery completely, even when individual ads look perfect. A suspension for “Circumventing systems,” repeated policy violations, suspicious payment activity, or failing required verification steps can stop impressions overnight. These issues tend to be more stressful because they affect every campaign and often come with dense or generic notification language.

Google has made real progress in reducing how often legitimate advertisers are wrongly swept into these enforcement nets. According to coverage of recent changes by PPC Land’s report on Google Ads AI improvements, enhanced AI detection systems and clearer policies reduced incorrect advertiser account suspensions by over 80 percent and enabled Google to resolve about 99 percent of advertiser appeals within roughly 24 hours. That’s encouraging, but it also underscores how much automation controls eligibility behind the scenes.

When dealing with an account issue, the worst response is frantic editing across campaigns. The best approach is methodical: read the suspension or warning email carefully, check the Account Issues or Policy Manager sections, and respond through the official forms with clear, factual information. If the issue stems from missing identity or business verification, gather documents first and then complete the process in one clean pass. If it stems from policy violations, focus on fixing the underlying causes, not just appealing and hoping for the best.

High-Risk Industries and Eligibility Limits

Not all businesses have the same path to ad eligibility. Some verticals carry more risk for users-think financial services, gambling, healthcare, and certain legal services-and Google’s systems reflect that. These areas often require certifications, licenses, or whitelisting before ads can run fully, and in some markets they may be banned or heavily restricted regardless of advertiser quality.

For example, financial products and services frequently require local licensing proof, clear disclosures on risks, and strict adherence to advertising standards drafted by regulators. Gambling and real-money gaming advertisers may need jurisdictional approvals and must respect local age and geography restrictions. Healthcare and pharmaceutical advertisers can run into both ad platform policies and country-specific regulatory rules at the same time, complicating creative and landing page design.

This environment means that what looks like “my ads aren’t showing” can actually be “my ads are in a regulated category that can’t serve until specific credentials are in place.” Treating this as a compliance and documentation project-rather than a copywriting tweak-tends to unlock eligibility much faster. Working with legal counsel or internal compliance teams is wise whenever regulations are involved, and ad strategy should flow from what is legally and platform-wise permitted, not the other way around.

Technical and UX Problems That Make Google Back Off

Even when policy and account status are clean, technical problems and user experience issues can hurt eligibility. Destination URLs that intermittently fail, tracking templates that break redirects, or SSL certificate problems can all trigger “Destination not working” or “Destination not crawlable” statuses. Those in turn can cause Google’s systems to withhold impressions while they re-check the site or wait for fixes.

Page experience matters as well. Intrusive interstitials, endless pop-ups, or auto-playing media can tip a borderline site into “poor experience” territory, especially on mobile. While this does not always show up as a full disapproval, it can contribute to lower quality assessments and make it harder for your ads to win auctions, even when technically eligible.

Accessibility is another underappreciated dimension. A 2024 study on web accessibility found that 67 percent of websites experienced increased accessibility violations when ads were present, with common issues including Focus Visible and On Input problems, as highlighted in an arXiv study on accessibility violations related to ads. When ad-related scripts or layouts cause accessibility issues or visual instability, it can indirectly hurt user trust and performance. Taking a holistic view-treating ads, landing pages, tracking, and accessibility as one system-tends to improve both eligibility and results.

A Step-by-Step Troubleshooting Workflow

When ads stop showing, jumping straight into random fixes is tempting but inefficient. A structured workflow finds the real cause faster and avoids turning a small issue into a bigger one. Start at the top level: is the account active, billed properly, and free of suspensions or critical warnings? If yes, move to campaigns: confirm they are enabled, targeting reasonable locations and languages, and not hilariously constrained by budget.

Next, zoom into ad groups and ads. Check the Status column for each ad and keyword and skim the Policy details. If something is “Under review,” note how long it has been in that state-brand new or heavily edited ads often need a bit of time. “Disapproved” or “Eligible (limited)” labels deserve immediate attention in the Policy Manager, where you can see patterns: maybe all disapprovals relate to a particular phrase, landing page, or tracking setup.

Once policy and basic delivery are cleared, move to performance diagnostics. Use ad preview tools to test eligibility for different queries, locations, and devices. Compare impression share, top-of-page rate, and click-through rates across time to see whether you are losing auctions due to rank, bids, or budget rather than eligibility. At this stage, experimenting with different match types, ad formats, or bidding strategies can help, but only after you are confident that nothing is being blocked or throttled at a policy or technical level.

When to Bring in Experts (What We Do at North Country Consulting)

At some point, internal teams hit a wall. The mix of policy nuance, technical tracking, account-level signals, and industry-specific rules can be tough to untangle while also handling day-to-day marketing responsibilities. That’s where specialized partners earn their keep. At North Country Consulting, we live inside Google Ads accounts all day, which gives us a clear view of what “normal” looks like-and what a real eligibility problem feels like.

Our approach starts with a structured diagnostic: we review account status, payment and verification histories, Policy Manager patterns, landing page experience, and the technical stack around tracking and tagging. Because we keep a close eye on enforcement trends, we know how the environment is shifting. For instance, seeing that Google blocked or removed 415 million scam-related ads and suspended over 5 million accounts in a single year, as documented in the 2024 Google Ads Safety Report, shapes how we think about risk, wording, and landing page structure across our clients’ campaigns.

From there, we build a prioritized action plan: what must be fixed immediately to restore or protect eligibility, what should be restructured for long-term compliance and performance, and where there are opportunities to expand into new formats or networks safely. Because we operate as a strategic partner rather than just an execution arm, we also coordinate with legal, product, and analytics teams when needed. If you are tired of guessing why ads aren’t showing, or dealing with recurring disapprovals and limited serving, working with us at North Country Consulting is often the quickest way to move from reactive firefighting to a stable, scalable acquisition engine.

Ready to ensure your Google Ads are not just showing, but also performing at their best? At North Country Consulting, our deep expertise—rooted in our founder's extensive experience at Google and leading revenue teams at major startups—positions us to optimize your ecommerce and leadgen campaigns like no other. Don't let eligibility issues or policy roadblocks slow down your success. Book a free consultation with us today and take the first step towards a more effective and efficient Google Ads strategy.