Google has removed more than 247.4 million ads and blocked 2.9 million advertiser accounts in India in 2024, as part of its global effort to combat harmful advertising, according to its latest Ads Safety Report.
In India, the biggest problems were ads related to financial services that broke the rules. Other common issues included ads that used someone else’s trademark without permission, misused Google’s ad system, showed personalised content in the wrong way, or promoted gambling and games.
“With billions worldwide depending on Google for reliable information, including ads, our dedicated team works tirelessly to protect the digital advertising ecosystem. Our policies are designed to support a safe and positive experience for our users, which is why we prohibit content that we believe to be harmful to users and the overall advertising ecosystem,” Google said in its India report.
Globally, the company has removed over 5.1 billion advertisements, restricted over 9.1 billion advertisements, and suspended over 39.2 million advertiser accounts.
To enhance detection, Google increasingly relied on artificial intelligence, including large language models (LLMs), to identify and remove malicious content more efficiently. These tools improved the speed and accuracy of enforcement, especially in identifying nuanced policy violations.
“Last year, we continued to invest heavily in making our LLMs more advanced than ever, launching over 50 enhancements to our models which enabled more efficient and precise enforcement at scale. Prioritising these technical advancements allows our teams to focus on more complex, ambiguous problems, which in turn provides our LLMs with nuanced training data to better address these instances in the future.”
The report also highlights steps taken to ensure the integrity of election advertising. Google introduced stricter identity verification and transparency rules, removing more than 7.3 million election ads from advertisers who failed to complete the verification process. This is part of a broader commitment to safeguarding democratic processes.
Publisher enforcement also saw a sharp increase. Ads were blocked or restricted on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, and site-level enforcement actions were taken on over 395,000 publisher sites—up from 300,000 in 2022. This shows a concerted effort to clean up the broader ecosystem in which ads are served.
