What a limit does to an account
Limited Ad Serving does not reject creative. Google's policy page states that it "limits impressions of ads that are more likely to result in negative ads experiences," applied to searches judged more likely than others to produce them, and that "individual ads will not be disapproved." The account keeps running. It reaches fewer people.
Qualification is assessed on seven factors: account attributes, user activity and reports, account maturity, ad format usage, history of policy compliance, advertiser industry, and advertiser verification status. Google's language on the user-report factor is unusually direct: "When users have persistently and disproportionately reported that an advertiser's content, products, or behavior do not meet their expectations, we may consider that advertiser unqualified."
Enforcement itself is not new. It began in September 2024 and has been applied gradually across YouTube ads. What the August 2026 update changes is scope, from a subset of ad serving to all Google Ads, with guidance now naming Search, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and the Play Store.
Why would an advertiser not notice?
An account whose impressions are being limited produces a performance shape with several ordinary explanations. Impression share falls, volume thins, and the campaign looks like it is losing auctions to somebody bidding harder. There is no disapproval to find in the policy manager, and the in-account notification that would explain it arrives in the same place as every other Google Ads notification.
Account maturity is one of the seven factors, and Search Engine Land reports Google saying advertisers with strong trust signals will not be affected by impression limits. A new account therefore carries more of this risk than a long-running one with a clean record, which is the opposite of where most advertisers look when volume drops.
What to do about it
Complete advertiser verification if it is still open
Verification status is one of the seven factors and one of the few an advertiser sets. Google's best-practice list leads with it, alongside compliance with the ad policies. If your account is eligible and verification has never been finished, it is the one item on the list with a defined end state.
Make the ad and the landing page name the same business
The rest of Google's best-practice list is about identification: keep branding clear and consistent across ads and landing pages, identify your business plainly, avoid generic ad copy in Search campaigns, and pin your domain to headline position 1 where the format allows it. These read as anti-cloaking hygiene, and they cost a store with nothing to hide almost nothing to satisfy.