The AdSense approval checklist (2026)

• You are at least 18. If you are younger, the account must be in a parent or guardian's name.
• You have a valid postal address in a country AdSense operates in, and you can receive mail there — a PIN is posted to it once earnings reach the verification threshold.
• The payee name matches the bank account you intend to use. Mismatches surface much later and are painful to unwind.
• You do not already have an AdSense account. A second account for the same person is a policy violation, not a convenience.
• You own the domain, or have a publisher relationship with the owner that lets you place ads on it.

This is where most applications are decided. The bar is not 'well written'; it is 'substantial, original, and useful to someone specific'.

• A real body of pages, each answering one question completely. A handful of thin pages is the single most common cause of rejection.
• Original material — your own writing, data, screenshots, photographs or testing. Rewordings of other sites' articles fail even when the rewording is competent.
• No scraped feeds, syndicated blocks, auto-translated pages or spun text.
• Content in a language AdSense supports. Check the supported-languages list before you build in a less common one.
• Nothing in a restricted category: adult material, hacking or cracking instructions, weapons and explosives, recreational drugs, counterfeit goods, or content that facilitates dishonest behaviour.
• No copyrighted material you do not have the right to publish — including images. Stock photos need a licence that covers commercial use.

• A persistent header menu that reaches every major section of the site in one click.
• No dead links, no empty category pages, no 'coming soon' placeholders in the navigation.
• A content hub or index page listing your articles, linked from the header.
• Internal links inside articles so a reader can move sideways through related material.
• A footer carrying about, contact, privacy and terms.
• The site works on a phone: readable text without zooming, tap targets that are not stacked on top of each other, no horizontal scrolling.

Their absence is a fast rejection, and so is their presence as empty stubs. Each needs to say something true and specific about your site.

• About — who runs the site, what it does, and why you are qualified to run it. A named human or organisation, not an anonymous paragraph.
• Contact — a working method of reaching you. An email address or a form that actually delivers.
• Privacy policy — what data you collect, what third parties (including Google) set cookies, and how visitors can opt out. If you serve users in the EU or UK, this needs to be accurate, not boilerplate.
• Terms of service — the conditions of using your site, any disclaimers, and limits of liability.

• The site loads over HTTPS with a valid certificate and does not fall back to http.
• robots.txt exists and does not disallow Googlebot or Mediapartners-Google from the site.
• An XML sitemap exists, lists your real pages, and is submitted in Search Console.
• No stray noindex tags on pages you want reviewed — a leftover sitewide noindex from a staging build is a surprisingly common killer.
• A viewport meta tag in the head of every page.
• Reasonable load speed. Slow is not an automatic rejection, but a site that takes many seconds to render makes every other judgement worse.
• ads.txt at the domain root once you have your publisher ID.

You can verify the crawl-side items on any URL with the free checker on this site — HTTPS, robots.txt, sitemap, viewport, ads.txt, policy-page links, content depth and PageSpeed scores in one pass.

There is no minimum traffic requirement for approval, despite the myth. What matters is where traffic comes from. Purchased traffic, traffic exchanges, pop-under networks, incentivised clicks and bot traffic all violate policy, and a pattern of them can sink an application or an approved account later.

Organic search, social sharing, newsletters and direct visits are all fine, at any volume — including near zero.

• Paste the AdSense code snippet into the head of every page and leave it there through the review — Google needs to be able to place ads to complete the check.
• Do not create empty labelled boxes where ads will go; blank framed placeholders make the site read as an ad shell.
• Do not place ads on pages with no content, on error pages, or behind pop-ups.
• Never encourage clicks, and never click your own ads while testing.

1. Read your own site end to end on a phone as if you had never seen it.
2. Confirm every navigation link resolves and every page has real content.
3. Verify the domain in Google Search Console and submit the sitemap.
4. Wait until the Pages report shows your key URLs as indexed.
5. Then submit the site in AdSense and leave it alone. Reviews typically take a few days to a few weeks.