Google blocked 8.3 billion ads in 2025 and suspended fewer advertisers

In short: Google says it blocked more ads in 2025, but it suspended fewer advertiser accounts as it used more AI to catch rule-breaking ads earlier.

What's going on

Google said it blocked 8.3 billion ads worldwide in 2025, up from 5.1 billion the year before. These numbers come from the company’s 2025 Ads Safety Report.

At the same time, Google suspended fewer advertiser accounts than the jump in blocked ads might suggest. The company said this is because it is now using AI, including its Gemini models (Google’s in-house AI systems), to stop more bad ads before they ever show up.

Google says its AI systems caught more than 99% of policy-violating ads before users saw them. A Google ads privacy and safety leader, Keerat Sharma, said the company is moving away from the “blunt instrument” of suspending accounts and toward judging ads one by one. Think of it like rejecting a specific bad package at the door instead of banning the whole sender forever.

Google also pointed to scammers using generative AI (tools that can quickly create text and images) to produce misleading ads in large volumes. Google said its systems look for patterns across these campaigns to block them sooner.

The company said 602 million ads and 4 million advertiser accounts were linked to scams. In the U.S., Google removed over 1.7 billion ads and suspended 3.3 million advertiser accounts in 2025.

What to watch

Google says this approach reduced incorrect suspensions by 80% year over year, but the company also expects the numbers to change as scammers adapt. A key question is whether blocking individual ads, instead of banning more accounts, keeps repeat scammers from coming back.

Source: TechCrunch AI