Google Ads Landing Page Compliance Checklist for Affiliates

Most affiliates who get disapproved never had an ad problem. The headline was fine. The keywords were fine. The budget cleared. What broke was the page on the other side of the click.

I'm Mike, and I work on the payments side at YeezyPay. That means I spend a lot of time talking to media buyers right after something goes wrong, because the first symptom of a policy problem is usually financial: spend stops, the account sits frozen, and the money that went in yesterday is now parked behind a review queue. Over the last two years the single most common cause I've seen isn't a banned vertical or a sketchy creative. It's a landing page that technically works but doesn't survive Google's Destination Requirements review.

So this is the checklist I wish more affiliates ran before they launch, not after.

Most affiliate disapprovals are landing page decisions, not creative decisions.

Why Google treats affiliate pages differently

It doesn't, officially. There's no separate "affiliate policy" that applies only to you. What happens instead is that affiliate pages tend to trip three policy areas at once, and those three areas happen to be the ones Google enforces hardest.

The first is Destination Requirements, which governs what the page behind the ad has to be. The second is Misrepresentation, which covers whether the promise in the ad matches the reality on the page. The third is the advertiser identity layer — who you are, and whether Google can tell. A typical affiliate funnel is thin on original content, redirects at least once, and is published under a business name that doesn't obviously belong to anybody. That's three flags on one page. A brand advertiser usually trips none of them.

My honest opinion: affiliates don't get punished for being affiliates. They get punished for building the cheapest possible page that still converts, because "cheapest possible" and "insufficient original content" describe the same artifact.

The disapprovals that actually hit affiliate pages

Google's Destination Requirements policy lists a long set of violation types. Only a handful of them matter for affiliate traffic in practice. Here's what shows up, what it looks like in the account, and what fixes it.

Violation	What it looks like	What fixes it
Insufficient original content	Page is mostly ads, replicated supplier copy, or exists only to bounce the user onward	Original writing, real comparisons, your own testing, genuine utility on the page itself
Destination mismatch	Display URL, final URL and tracking template don't resolve to the same domain and content	Display domain must match the landing domain; kill cross-domain redirects
Destination not crawlable	robots.txt blocks AdsBot, or JS-only rendering hides the content	Explicitly allow AdsBot-Google; serve meaningful server-side HTML
Destination not accessible	Page is geo-blocked or IP-filtered in the country you're targeting	Remove country blocks for targeted geos, including your own cloaker's rules
Unclear relevance	Ad promotes one product, page is a generic list or a different offer	One ad group, one offer, one page — matched
Unavailable offers	Price or promo in the ad isn't easy to find on the page	Put the exact claimed offer above the fold
Unacceptable business practices	Hiding or misrepresenting who you are or what's being sold	Nothing, after the fact — this one suspends accounts

That last row deserves its own paragraph, because it's a different class of risk. Google's Misrepresentation policy states that scamming users by hiding or misrepresenting information about your business, products or services isn't allowed — and that violations of it trigger immediate account suspension without prior warning, with reinstatement only in what Google describes as compelling circumstances. Everything else on that table costs you an ad. This one costs you the account.

Checklist 1: content and originality

This is where bridge pages die. Google's wording under insufficient original content specifically names pages whose content is primarily advertising, content replicated from another source without adding value, and pages that exist only to redirect users elsewhere.

Run these checks:

• Could this page stand alone as a resource? If you stripped every affiliate link out, would a stranger still get something from it? If the answer is no, you have a bridge page with extra steps.
• Is any of the copy yours? Merchant descriptions pasted verbatim count as replicated content. Rewrite them, and add something the merchant doesn't say.
• Does the page do work? A comparison table you actually built, a calculator, screenshots you took yourself, a real methodology note — these are the difference between a review and a doorway.
• Is the affiliate relationship disclosed? Beyond Google, the FTC requires clear and conspicuous disclosure of material connections. Put it near the top, in plain language, not buried in the footer.
• Ratio check. If ad units and outbound affiliate buttons outweigh the body text visually, you're in "primarily advertising" territory.

Checklist 2: the technical layer

Two separate things live here, and people conflate them constantly. Crawlability and accessibility are policy — fail them and the ad gets disapproved. Speed and mobile usability are economics — fail them and the ad runs, but you pay more for it.

On the policy side: Google's AdsBot crawler has to be able to reach your page and read it. A robots.txt that blocks everything with a wildcard blocks AdsBot too, and the disapproval reads as "destination not crawlable" even though a human browser loads the page perfectly. Allow AdsBot-Google and AdsBot-Google-Mobile explicitly. The same applies to server-side country blocking, WAF rules, and aggressive bot filters — if your stack decides Google's crawler looks suspicious, Google decides your page doesn't exist.

Redirects are the other technical trap. A redirect that lands the user on a different domain than the one shown in your display URL is a destination mismatch, full stop. Tracking templates and click-tracking domains count. You can use a tracker; you can't use one that changes where the user ends up relative to what the ad said.

And cloaking — showing Google's reviewers one page and users another — sits in a category of its own. It isn't a disapproval risk, it's a termination risk, and it's the single behaviour I'd tell anyone to walk away from. The economics don't survive one enforcement event.

On the economics side, Core Web Vitals are the numbers worth holding yourself to: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. These aren't policy thresholds. They feed landing page experience, which feeds Quality Score, which sets what you pay per click relative to competitors in the same auction. Affiliates run thin margins by definition. Paying a Quality Score penalty on every click is a slow way to lose.

Checklist 3: the trust pages nobody wants to build

Here's a pattern I see constantly and it still surprises me. An affiliate builds a genuinely good review site — original testing, real photos, useful comparisons — and gets disapproved anyway, because there's no way to tell who runs it.

Google's Misrepresentation policy explicitly covers providing an inaccurate business name or one that doesn't clearly represent the advertised business, and covers hiding identity to imply qualifications you don't have. An anonymous site with no contact route reads to a reviewer exactly like a site built to be disposable.

Minimum set, on every affiliate property:

• Privacy policy — real one, matching the tracking you actually run, covering cookies and any data you collect
• Terms of service — including your affiliate disclosure
• Contact information — a working email at the domain, and a physical address if you have a registered entity
• About page — who publishes this, with a name attached
• Consistent business identity — the name in your Google Ads account, the name on the site, and the name on the WHOIS or the payment method should tell the same story

That last point matters more than the first four combined, and it's the one affiliates skip. Identity consistency is what advertiser verification checks, and inconsistency there is what turns a routine review into a suspension.

Vertical rules that override everything above

A perfect landing page in a restricted vertical is still a restricted vertical. Check your category before you check your checklist.

Vertical	What applies
Health and nutra	Healthcare and medicines policy. No unproven claims, no before/after transformation imagery, no implied cures. Many products need certification; some are prohibited outright.
Personal finance	Financial products and services policy. Full cost disclosure — APR, fees, repayment terms — on the page. Local licensing and certification requirements apply per country.
Crypto	Advertiser certification required, granted per targeted country, plus applicable local registration. Exchanges and wallets only; most token promotion stays prohibited.
Gambling	Certification required per country, licensed operators only, with mandatory responsible-gambling information and age gating.

Certifications attach to the advertiser and the geo, not to the page. You can't inherit one from the merchant you're promoting.

The ten-minute pre-launch test

You don't need tooling for this. You need ten minutes and a bit of discipline before you push a campaign live.

1. Fetch the page as a crawler. curl -A "AdsBot-Google" -I https://yourpage.com. Anything other than a 200 is a disapproval waiting to happen. Then fetch it without -I and confirm the body actually contains your copy rather than an empty JavaScript shell.
2. Open it through a VPN in every country you're targeting. Not one country. Every one. Geo-blocking you forgot about is the quietest failure on this list.
3. Follow the redirect chain by hand. Paste your final URL with tracking parameters attached and watch where it lands. Compare that domain, character for character, to your display URL.
4. Read your ad copy and your page side by side. Every claim, price and promo in the ad should be visible on the page without scrolling or clicking. If you have to hunt for it, so will a reviewer.
5. Load it on a real phone on mobile data. Not desktop emulation on office wifi. Most affiliate traffic is mobile, and most affiliate pages are tested on desktop.
6. Click every footer link. Privacy, terms, contact, about. Broken trust pages are worse than missing ones, because they signal a template nobody maintains.

My second opinion, and this one costs people real money: run this test on the template, not on one page. Affiliates scale by cloning. A rule that kills one page kills the whole set, and a set of two hundred pages disapproved at once looks, from Google's side, much less like an accident.

What to do when you're disapproved anyway

Start by reading the actual reason string in the policy manager rather than guessing. Google states that it provides information on its decision for any policy violation enforcement action — that string is the only reliable signal about which of the categories above you hit.

Then, in order:

1. Fix the page first, appeal second. Appealing an unchanged page burns an appeal and teaches you nothing.
2. Fix it everywhere. If one page in a template tripped a rule, every page using that template will too.
3. Give the crawler time. AdsBot needs to re-fetch before a re-review reflects your changes.
4. Appeal once, with specifics. Say what you changed and where. Repeat appeals on the same asset don't help.
5. Treat an account-level suspension differently. Under unacceptable business practices there's no routine re-review path — reinstatement is discretionary, and building a fresh account on the same identity to get around it is itself a violation.

One case from our side of the desk

Earlier this year a buyer came to us convinced his agency account had been throttled on the payment side, because spend had flatlined right after a top-up. It hadn't. His balance was intact. What had happened was that his review site sat behind a firewall rule that blocked every non-residential IP range — put in months earlier to keep scrapers off — and Google's crawler was inside that block.

The page loaded fine for him. It loaded fine for every customer. It returned nothing to AdsBot, so every ad pointing at it went down as destination not crawlable, and to him that looked identical to a funding failure. One allow rule fixed it. He'd spent eleven days assuming it was money.

I bring it up because it's the version of this problem I'd least expect anyone to catch on their own, and because it's a reminder that "my page works" and "my page passes review" are answers to different questions.

The short version

If you keep one thing from this: Google isn't asking affiliates to stop being affiliates. It's asking whether the page adds something, whether the promise matches, whether the destination is reachable, and whether a real business stands behind it. Four questions.

Most affiliate pages fail on the first and the fourth. Both are fixable in an afternoon, and both are cheaper to fix before the disapproval than after.

Build the page you'd be comfortable defending to a human reviewer, because eventually you'll have to.