The four policy pages every AdSense site needs

These pages answer a question that sits underneath the whole review: is there an accountable person behind this site? An anonymous site with no way to reach anyone and a generated privacy page is the profile of a disposable property, and disposable properties are what ad fraud is built on.

They also carry legal weight independent of AdSense. Serving personalised ads means third-party cookies, and several jurisdictions require you to disclose that clearly.

The single most-skimped page. It should let a stranger understand, in thirty seconds, who is behind the site and why they should trust it.

• A named person or organisation. 'We are a team of passionate writers' is the phrasing of a site with nothing to say.
• What the site covers, and for whom.
• Why you are qualified — your experience, your work, the reason you started.
• How the content is produced: your own testing, your own research, how you verify facts.
• For a tool site, what the tool does, how it works, and what it deliberately does not do.

Two hundred honest words beat eight hundred generic ones, but do not stop at a sentence.

• A real, monitored email address, or a form that actually delivers. Test it from an address you own before applying.
• State roughly how quickly you respond. It costs nothing and signals a live site.
• A postal address or business registration if you have one — optional for individuals, expected for businesses.
• Avoid making the only contact route a social media handle.

If you use a form, check it against your spam filter and confirm delivery end to end. A form that silently drops submissions is functionally a missing contact page.

This is the page with actual legal exposure, and the one most often copied verbatim from a template that does not describe your site.

• What you collect, concretely: analytics data, form submissions, server logs, whatever your site truly touches. If you collect nothing but standard access logs, say that.
• Third parties that set cookies or receive data — Google AdSense and Google Analytics named explicitly, plus anything else you embed.
• That third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on prior visits to your site or other sites.
• How users can opt out of personalised advertising, with a link to Google's ads settings.
• Your legal basis and rights under GDPR if you have EU or UK visitors, and CCPA disclosures if you have Californian ones — which, on an open website, you probably do.
• How to contact you about data, and the date the policy was last updated.

A generated policy is an acceptable starting point. Reading it line by line and correcting anything untrue about your site is not optional — a policy claiming you operate a shop and process payments, on a site that does neither, is worse than a short accurate one.

• The conditions of using the site, and what constitutes acceptable use.
• Ownership of your content and what visitors may do with it.
• Disclaimers appropriate to what you publish. A tool site should state plainly that outputs are informational and not guaranteed; a finance or health site needs a professional-advice disclaimer.
• Limitation of liability, and the governing jurisdiction.
• A last-updated date and a route for questions.

• Link all four from the footer of every page — the first place both reviewers and automated checkers look.
• Use plain, conventional link text: About, Contact, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service. Clever names defeat detection.
• Use conventional URLs: /about, /contact, /privacy, /terms.
• Keep them indexable. Noindexing your policy pages hides them from exactly the process that wants to see them.
• Render links in server HTML rather than only inside a JavaScript-built menu, so simple crawlers see them too.

The checker on this site scans a homepage's links for these four patterns and reports which it found — a quick way to confirm they are discoverable in raw HTML rather than only visible to a browser.

If you serve visitors in the EU, the UK or Switzerland and run personalised ads, you need a consent mechanism that meets Google's EU user consent policy — in practice, a certified consent management platform. Google's own funding-choices tooling is one route. This is separate from the privacy page but referenced by it, and it is enforced after approval as well as before.