Google on Wednesday revealed that it suspended over 39.2 million advertiser accounts in 2024, with a majority of them identified and blocked by its systems before it could serve harmful ads to users.
In all, the tech giant said it stopped 5.1 billion bad ads, restricted 9.1 billion ads, and blocked or restricted ads on 1.3 billion pages last year. It also suspended over 5 million accounts for scam-related violations.
In comparison, Google suspended over 12.7 million advertiser accounts, stopped 5.5 billion bad ads, restricted 6.9 billion ads, and blocked or restricted ads on 2.1 billion pages in 2023.
The top six ad policy violations included ad network abuse (793.1 million), trademark misuse (503.1 million), personalized ads (491.3 million), legal requirements (280.3 million), financial services (193.7 million), and misrepresentation (146.9 million), among others.
Most of the pages on which its ads were blocked or restricted include sexual content, dangerous or derogatory content, malware, shocking content, weapons promotion and sales, online gambling, tobacco, alcohol sale or misuse, intellectual property abuse, and sexually explicit content.
Google said it has been using artificial intelligence (AI) powered tools to quickly flag emerging threats and abuse patterns, using signals like business impersonation and illegitimate payment details as early indicators to tackle ad fraud.
“For instance, we tackled AI-generated deepfakes used in public figure impersonation scams, suspending over 700,000 accounts for this specific violation as part of our broader effort that blocked/removed 415 million ads and suspended over 5 million accounts for scam-related violations,” the company said in a statement shared with The Hacker News.
Google also said it expanded Advertiser identity verification to more than 200 countries and territories to increase transparency and enforce requirements for AI-generated content in election ads. As a result, more than 8,900 new election advertisers were verified and over 10.7 million election ads from unverified accounts were removed in 2024.
Google’s ongoing efforts towards ads safety come as malvertising continues to be an important initial access vector for malware, with threat actors abusing fraudulent ads on Google Search (and other search engines) to drive users to phony sites.
“The ad safety landscape is constantly changing, reshaped by technological breakthroughs like advancements in AI, emerging abuse tactics, and global events, demanding continuous agility from our industry,” it said.
