Nothing changed on your side, which is why this is so confusing. The policy is complaint-driven: the restriction applies when a trademark owner files, not when you write the ad. Your campaign can run for a year and stop on a Tuesday.
No cost. A straight answer within one business day on which route out applies.
Where the term appears
Most advertisers respond to a trademark complaint by pausing their keywords. That is usually the wrong half, and it costs them the traffic without fixing the restriction.
Bidding on a trademarked term as a keyword is broadly allowed. Competitors bid on each other's brand names constantly, and Google's own commercial interest is in that competition continuing.
If you have paused trademarked keywords in response to a complaint, you may have removed working traffic without touching what was actually restricted.
Using a trademark in headlines or descriptions is what the policy addresses. Once the owner files a valid complaint, ads carrying the term in their text can be restricted or disapproved.
There are exceptions. Resellers may use the term where the landing page is primarily dedicated to selling the trademarked product or service. Informational sites may use it where the purpose is genuinely to inform about the product rather than to sell something else.
One detail that catches people: the qualifying content has to be readable text on the page. If the evidence that you sell or inform about the product exists only inside images or video, it may not be assessed at all.
Not sure whether an exception applies to your landing page?
Get it reviewedBefore you change anything
The most common reaction and usually the wrong one. Bidding on the term is generally permitted; using it in the ad copy is what the complaint restricts. Advertisers frequently switch off the traffic and leave the actual violation running.
Comparative advertising is legitimate, but using someone's trademark to steer buyers to a competing product is not, and it is a materially worse position than an ordinary complaint. Repeated violations here escalate rather than sitting still.
A commercial arrangement with the trademark owner does not register anything with Google. If authorisation is the route, the owner has to submit the request. That takes roughly five to seven business days, so it cannot be arranged on the morning a campaign launches.
They are different outcomes. Limited means the ad runs somewhere, or that it does not currently meet the reseller and informational site policy. That is a better position than a flat disapproval and it points at a different fix.
If the ads are already off, the fastest route out is usually not authorisation.
Get it reviewedHow this works
Questions about the notice, the ads and the pages they point at. Answered within one business day with a read on the likely cause.
Read-only access to the account and a look at the landing pages. Disapprovals are usually decided by the page rather than by the ad text.
Which policy is actually being triggered, what has to change on the ads and the pages, and how to avoid it escalating to a strike.
The ads corrected and resubmitted for review, then managed through to approval.
Get it reviewed
The notice and the pages the ads point at are usually enough to identify which policy is being triggered. No account access needed to answer these, and you get a reply within one business day.
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Email me directly at rob@leftclick.co.nz and I'll pick it up from there.
A reply within one business day, from me. No cost, no obligation, and if it isn't worth pursuing you'll be told that plainly.
Prefer email? rob@leftclick.co.nz
Nineteen years in search marketing. Eight of them running my own agency, sold in 2021. Four years managing seven-figure United States advertising accounts in consumer credit, a category Google scrutinises hardest.
In that industry, compliance, suspensions, disapprovals and verification reviews are a frequent occurrence and a condition of operating.
You deal with me directly, from the first reply through to the decision.
Questions
No. Google decides. What can be committed to is finding what's actually triggering the disapproval, fixing it properly, and telling you plainly if it can't be fixed.
Because the policy is complaint-driven. Nothing is restricted until a trademark owner files, and they file when they notice. That is why the change appears to come from nowhere, and why nothing you did explains the timing.
Three. Remove the term from your ad text, which is immediate and often correct. Qualify under the reseller or informational site policy, which depends on what your landing page genuinely does. Or obtain authorisation from the trademark owner, who submits a request to Google. The first is fastest; the third takes roughly five to seven business days and depends on someone else.
It helps, but the test is what the landing page shows. The page has to be primarily dedicated to selling the trademarked product or service, and that has to be evident as text rather than only in images or video. A reseller page that mostly promotes your own brand may not qualify.
A single complaint restricts ads rather than accounts. Repeated unresolved trademark violations are a different matter and can escalate, which is the reason to deal with it rather than leaving the affected ads paused indefinitely.
No, and this is worth being clear about. Google's approval is a platform decision, not a legal one. An ad Google permits can still infringe a trademark, and that is a question for a lawyer rather than for an advertising platform. Anyone telling you otherwise is overselling what an approval means.