How to Run Crypto Offers on Google Ads: Policy and Compliance
Crypto advertisers get stopped twice.
I'm Mike, and I work at YeezyPay, where we help advertisers in restricted markets get into Google Ads and keep their billing running. Crypto is the category where I see the most confusion, because people treat it as one problem when it's really two. Gate one is whether you can open and fund a Google Ads account at all from where you sit. Gate two is whether Google will let your specific crypto product be advertised, anywhere, by anyone. Clearing one doesn't clear the other.
Most articles on this topic only cover gate two, and half of them get the details wrong. This one covers both, and every policy claim here comes from Google's own help articles with the article number attached so you can check me.
Two gates: account access first, then product certification. They're separate problems.
What Google actually allows, restricts and bans
The governing document is "Cryptocurrencies and related products," Google Ads policy article 14009787. It sits under the wider Financial products and services policy (2464998). Crypto derivatives — CFDs, rolling spot forex, spread betting — aren't covered there at all. They fall under Complex speculative financial products (15188218), which is a different certification entirely.
Everything in the crypto policy sorts into three buckets.
| Tier | What's in it | Certification? |
|---|---|---|
| Allowed | Businesses accepting crypto as payment · mining hardware · blockchain-based tax, legal and security services · educational material (not investment advice) · blockchain games where NFT items are consumed in gameplay | No |
| Restricted | Crypto exchanges · software wallets · hardware wallets · coin trusts | Yes, per location |
| Prohibited | ICOs, token pre-sales and IDOs · DeFi trading protocols · promotion of buying, selling or trading crypto · crypto lending · unhosted wallets and unregulated dApps · exchange aggregators and comparison sites · investment advice and trading signals · NFT wagering games · social casinos with NFT rewards · real-money gambling with crypto | No path |
Look at that middle column in the prohibited row again. "Promotion of the purchase, sale or trade of cryptocurrencies" is a wide net. It's why cloud mining services keep getting killed even though the policy never names cloud mining as a category — enforcement picks them up under that clause plus the unreliable-claims rules in the financial products policy. That's my read of how it plays out in practice, not a line you'll find quoted in the help centre.
Hardware wallets are the quiet exception worth knowing. They need certification like everything else in the restricted tier, but no licence, because they only store private keys. The moment a hardware wallet product adds buy, sell, swap or trade functionality, it stops being a hardware wallet in Google's eyes and inherits the exchange requirements.
The country list is shorter than you've been told
Certification follows the licence — and the licence follows the legal entity.
Certification only exists for a fixed set of target locations. If your targeting isn't on the list, the answer isn't "apply harder," it's no.
As of September 2026 the approved locations are: all 27 EU member states, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Israel, Bahrain, the UAE, South Africa and Argentina.
Now the part that matters more. Singapore and Australia are not on that list. Neither are Brazil, Mexico, India, Turkey, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia or New Zealand. I keep seeing widely-shared posts that list Singapore and Australia as approved markets, and advertisers plan launches around that. They're wrong. For Singapore it isn't even close — MAS published PS-G02 back in January 2022, barring digital payment token providers from promoting to the public through third-party websites, broadcast and print media, or influencers. A firm's own site, app and official social accounts are the whole permitted surface.
Here's my opinion after watching people burn quarters on this: the country list is the first thing you should check and the last thing anyone actually checks. Read it off Google's page on the day you plan, not off a blog post from last year. It moved three times in the last eighteen months.
Who has to licence you, by country
Certification isn't Google vouching for you. It's Google verifying that a named regulator already has.
| Location | Required authorisation |
|---|---|
| EU 27 + Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway | CASP authorisation under MiCA from the national competent authority |
| United Kingdom | FCA registration |
| United States | FinCEN MSB registration plus a state money transmitter licence, or a federal/state-chartered bank |
| United States — coin trusts | Registration under Section 12 of the Exchange Act via Form 10-12g, plus ongoing reporting |
| Canada | FINTRAC registration as a money services business |
| Japan | FSA registration as a crypto asset exchange service provider |
| South Korea | VASP report filed with the Commissioner of KoFIU |
| Hong Kong | SFC Type 1 and Type 7 licences; advertiser must opt into the licensing regime |
| Switzerland | FINMA licence |
| UAE | FSRA (multilateral trading facility) or VARA licence |
| Indonesia | OJK licence |
| Thailand | SEC Digital Asset Business licence |
| Philippines | BSP Money Services certificate |
| Israel | CMISA licence or Bank of Israel licence |
| South Africa | FSCA registration |
| Argentina | VASP registry via the CNV |
| Bahrain | Central Bank of Bahrain licence |
The UK stacks a second gate on top. Any financial services ad in the UK — crypto or not — requires Financial Services Verification (15332527), which is separate from crypto certification and has to clear first. Behind it sits FCA PS23/6, in force since 8 October 2023, which pulled qualifying cryptoassets into the section 21 FSMA financial promotions regime. That means mandatory risk warnings, no refer-a-friend incentives, a 24-hour cooling-off period for first-time retail investors, and appropriateness assessments. Your creative and your landing page both have to reflect it.
How the policy got here, and what changed recently
Google banned crypto ads outright in March 2018, effective that June. It reopened for certified exchanges in the US and Japan in October 2018, added software wallets in August 2021, then added coin trusts on 29 January 2024 — nineteen days after the SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs. Since then the pace has picked up considerably.
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 15 Jan 2025 | UK: FCA registration required alongside certification |
| 23 Apr 2025 | EU: MiCA CASP licence required for exchanges and software wallets |
| 16 Jul 2025 | Canada: FINTRAC MSB registration required |
| 30 Dec 2025 | Germany's MiCA transitional carve-out ends |
| Feb 2026 | Indonesia added. Certification applications start moving in-account (16885619, 16882849) |
| May 2026 | Help Centre application forms discontinued — in-account only (17067928) |
| 1 Jul 2026 | France: AMF DASP registration no longer accepted, MiCA CASP only (17218519) |
| Aug 2026 | Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway added (17264747) |
One correction while we're here. Several posts say the Help Centre application route closed in June 2026. Google's own announcement says May. If you're following a guide that has the month wrong, assume it has other things wrong too.
How to apply in 2026
The route changed this year, so old walkthroughs will send you to a form that no longer exists.
Complete advertiser verification first. Identity and business verification is a prerequisite, and a crypto certification application submitted before it's done will simply sit there. Then go to Admin → Policy → Account → Apply for certification inside the Google Ads account itself.
Then the part people underestimate: one application per location. Certification in Germany gives you nothing in Japan. Each market is its own submission, its own licence evidence, its own review. And certification attaches to the advertiser account and the legal entity holding the licence — not to a managing agency's MCC. An agency can't lend you its certification any more than it can lend you its FCA registration.
On timelines and approval odds, I'll be straight with you: Google publishes neither. Vendor estimates floating around suggest roughly 45 to 60 days and about a 40% approval rate. Treat those as one company's sample, not data. Plan for weeks, not days.
Stuck at gate one instead of gate two?
If the problem isn't certification but the fact that Google won't take your card, your country or your company at all, that's the part we handle. YeezyPay gives advertisers in restricted markets access to agency accounts with working billing — crypto, USDT or card — and support that speaks your language. Start at yeezypay.io.
We'll tell you honestly whether your offer clears gate two before you spend anything.
Landing pages: Google reads the whole site
The crawler doesn't stop at the page you submitted.
This is the single biggest surprise for crypto advertisers, and it costs people real money.
Google's crawler follows links. It reads your blog, your docs, your whitepaper, your legal pages, your subdomains. A tidy, compliant landing page sitting on a domain whose whitepaper describes liquidity pools and staking rewards will get pulled down, because the whitepaper is part of what you're advertising. Destination requirements (6368661) also demand that the destination actually work, be crawlable by AdsBot, and that your display URL domain match the final URL.
The recurring failure modes I'd audit for, in order:
- Whole-site bleed. Lending, staking or yield content anywhere on the domain, including subdomains and archived posts.
- Wallet-connect walls, token gating and geo-blocks. These make the crawler see different content than a human does, which reads as cloaking regardless of intent.
- Return language. "Guaranteed," "risk-free," "passive income," "yield," specific ROI figures, even "maximise returns." All of it trips the unreliable-claims rules.
- Category bleed. Hardware wallets and an unlicensed software wallet sold from the same site.
- Uncrawlable destinations. Sending traffic straight to Telegram or Discord.
- Missing disclosure. State the product category plainly and list your jurisdiction restrictions on the page.
Why crypto accounts get suspended
There are two enforcement regimes here and they behave completely differently.
The crypto policy, the financial products policy and destination requirements all warn you first. Google's text is explicit: violations won't lead to suspension without prior warning, and the warning comes at least seven days ahead. That's a real window. Use it.
Circumventing systems (15938075) works the opposite way — accounts are suspended on detection, without warning, with reinstatement only in "compelling circumstances." It covers cloaking, spinning up ad or domain variations to dodge disapprovals, opening fresh accounts after a suspension, and giving false information during advertiser verification.
Buried in that same policy is the clause almost nobody talks about: failing to re-certify or maintain required certifications after material business changes. Read that slowly. A certified exchange that bolts on a lending product, swaps its licensing entity, or expands into a new jurisdiction without re-certifying has moved itself from the seven-day-warning regime into the no-warning one. I've watched a client lose a five-figure-a-month account that way. Nothing about their ads changed; their corporate structure did, and they didn't tell Google.
For scale: Google's 2025 Ads Safety Report counts 8.3 billion ads blocked or removed, 4.8 billion restricted, and 24.9 million advertiser accounts suspended across 35 policy updates that year. Financial Services alone accounted for 327.8 million ads blocked and 273.4 million restricted — the second-largest restriction category after legal requirements. Account suspensions actually fell from 39.2 million in 2024, which Google credits to better intent detection rather than lighter enforcement. Gemini-based review reportedly cut incorrect suspensions by 80%.
Google doesn't publish crypto-specific suspension numbers. Anybody quoting you a "crypto suspension rate" invented it.
The pressure isn't arbitrary, either. The FBI's IC3 2025 report put crypto-linked fraud losses at a record $11.37 billion — more than half of all $20.9 billion in reported US internet crime — across 181,565 complaints, averaging $62,604 per victim. When you're waiting 50 days for certification, that's the number sitting behind the delay.
If you can't open an account in the first place
Now gate one, and I'm going to be honest about the limits.
Some countries can't hold a Google Ads account at all. Crimea, Cuba, the DNR and LNR, Iran and North Korea are under full embargo (6163740), and trade-sanction suspensions come with no grace period and no exceptions (15938379). Google suspended all advertising services in Russia in March 2022. Belarus stopped accepting new sign-ups in December 2024.
An agency account solves that layer. It gives you a working account, working billing, and a way to pay in a currency you actually hold. We built YeezyPay for exactly that, and we've covered the mechanics in how to pay for Google Ads from a restricted country and running Google Ads in Russia.
What it does not solve is gate two. Certification is bound to the licensed legal entity. If your company doesn't hold a MiCA CASP authorisation, no agency account conjures one. And using account access to work around a policy-based suspension is itself a circumventing systems violation — which, as covered above, is the category with no warning and almost no way back. Any provider telling you their agency account lets an unlicensed exchange advertise is selling you a suspension with extra steps.
Here's where I land. If you're a licensed crypto business locked out by geography, an agency account plus certification is a genuine path, and the order matters — access first, verification, then certification per market. If you're unlicensed, the honest answer is that Google Ads isn't open to you yet, and the work to do is regulatory, not advertising.
A short checklist before you spend anything
- Confirm your target country appears on the approved-locations list in article 14009787. Today, not from a blog.
- Confirm your product sits in the restricted tier, not the prohibited one. Lending, signals and aggregators have no path.
- Confirm you hold the exact licence named for that country, under the entity that will own the ads account.
- Complete advertiser verification before applying.
- Apply in-account, one application per location.
- Audit the entire domain, not just the landing page, for banned language and category bleed.
- Confine geo-targeting to certified locations only.
- Re-certify whenever your product, licence or jurisdiction materially changes.
Crypto is the strictest major category Google runs, but it's also the most written-down one. The regulators are named, the countries are listed, the deadlines are published. That predictability is worth something — once you're properly in, you're hard to knock out.
Just don't let anyone convince you that gate two has a shortcut. It doesn't.
