Google announced on Wednesday that it suspended more than 39.2 million ad accounts in 2024, with the majority identified and blocked by its system before providing harmful ads to users.
Overall, the Tech giant said it had stopped 5.1 billion ads on 1.3 billion pages last year, limiting 9.1 billion ads, blocking or limiting blocked or restricted ads. We have also suspended more than 5 million accounts for fraud-related violations.
The top six advertising 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 (133.7 million), and misunderstandings (1469 million).
Most pages where ads are blocked or restricted include sexual content, dangerous or mild content, malware, shocking content, weapon promotion and sale, online gambling, cigarettes, alcohol sales or misuse, intellectual property abuse, and sexually explicit content.
Google said it uses artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools to quickly flag new threats and abuse patterns, using signals such as business spoofing and illegal payment details as early indicators for tackling advertising fraud.
“We’ve tackled the AI-generated deepfakes used in celebrity impersonation scams, suspending over 700,000 accounts for this particular violation, blocked/deleted 415 million ads, and suspended over 5 million accounts for fraud-related violations.”
Google also said it has expanded advertisers’ identity verification to more than 200 countries and territories, increasing the transparency of AI-generated content in election ads and implementing the requirements. The result was that more than 8,900 new election advertisers were examined, and in 2024 more than 10.7 million election ads were removed from unverified accounts.
As Malvertising continues to be an important initial access vector for malware, Google’s ongoing commitment to ad safety, abusing fraudulent ads from Google search (and other search engines) to direct users to fake sites.
“The advertising safety environment is constantly changing, changing with advances in AI, new abuse tactics, and technological breakthroughs like global events, demanding continuous agility from the industry.”
Source link
