The AdSense approval checklist, explained point by point

Last updated July 2026 · about a 12 minute read

We run several content sites and we have been through the AdSense review more than once, including the humbling "low value content" rejection that sends you back to the drawing board with no detail whatsoever. This guide is the checklist we wish we had the first time: every criterion the review actually cares about, why it matters, and how to fix it. If you want the automated version, our free checker tests the measurable points in about a minute.

1. Content, the criterion that actually rejects people

Google never publishes a required page count, and anyone quoting an exact number is guessing. From experience and from hundreds of documented cases, sites that pass tend to show at least 20 to 30 substantial, indexed pages. Substantial means the page would deserve to exist even without ads on it.

Three questions decide whether your content passes:

• Is it original? Not "passed a plagiarism scanner" original, but "says something the top ten results do not already say" original. Republished feeds, spun text and template articles with the nouns swapped are exactly what the "low value content" rejection was built for.
• Is it deep enough? A page of 100 words is a business card, not content. We aim for 800 words and more on pillar articles, with the honest caveat that 2,000 thin words are worth less than 600 sharp ones.
• Does the site do more than host tools or galleries? This one bites a lot of developers. A site that is mostly calculators, generators or converters with no editorial layer around them routinely gets refused. Wrap your tools in real articles: how-tos, comparisons, use cases, background explanations.

A useful mental test: imagine the reviewer opens three random pages of your site. Would each one make sense on its own, teach something, and look like a person cared about it? If one of the three is a stub, an empty category or a placeholder, that is the page that writes the rejection email.

2. The four pages whose absence is an instant refusal

These take an afternoon and their absence is the most common self-inflicted rejection we see. The review checks for them mechanically, so treat them as mandatory:

• Privacy policy. Required, and it must specifically mention that third parties, Google included, use advertising cookies. A generic template that never says the word "cookie" does not satisfy the AdSense terms.
• Contact page. A real way to reach you: a form or a visible email address.
• About page. Who runs the site and why they are qualified to. Two honest paragraphs beat a page of corporate mist.
• Terms or legal notice. Not strictly required in every country, but its presence rounds out the picture of a site run by an adult.

Link all four from the footer. The footer is the first place a reviewer scrolls to.

3. Indexing, the silent killer

AdSense reviews what Google has indexed, not what sits on your server. A beautiful site with 200 pages of which 10 are indexed is, from the reviewer's chair, a 10 page site. We learned this one the hard way on a WordPress site whose plugin quietly noindexed most of the archive.

• Open Search Console and read the real number of indexed pages before you apply.
• Submit an XML sitemap and check it lists everything that matters.
• Hunt for stray noindex tags and X-Robots-Tag headers left over from launches.
• Make sure robots.txt does not block Googlebot or Mediapartners-Google, the AdSense crawler.
• Give a new domain a little history. A two week old domain with 30 articles posted the same day reads as manufactured, whatever the actual quality.

4. Structure and navigation

Reviewers click around. A clear menu, working categories, an honest 404 page and zero dead links tell them a human maintains this place. Broken navigation is listed by Google itself among the common rejection reasons, which makes it the cheapest fix on this page.

5. Policy compliance, including the edges you forgot

The obvious disqualifiers are adult content, violence, hate, piracy and anything illegal. The less obvious ones catch honest sites:

• Tech sites: security content framed as intrusion ("how to hack X") rather than defense or administration makes reviewers nervous. Frame tools and tutorials as diagnostics and legitimate administration, because that is what they are.
• Copyrighted images, embedded movies and song lyrics count against you even in passing.
• Health and finance content gets read with stricter eyes; sensational claims sink it.

6. Technical basics: necessary, not differentiating

Nobody gets approved because of their TLS setup, but people do get refused for the lack of it. The list is short: HTTPS everywhere with http redirecting to it, a mobile layout that works (Google reviews mobile-first), reasonable loading times, and your own domain rather than a free subdomain. Our checker covers all of these mechanically.

7. What strengthens a borderline application

None of these are required. All of them have tipped marginal cases in our experience:

• An author page with a real name, a face or at least a credible professional identity, and bylines on articles.
• Organization or Person structured data with sameAs links to real public profiles.
• A publishing rhythm. Three posts a week for a month says "alive" better than 40 posts dumped on day one.
• Some existing organic traffic. Not required, but a site with real visitors gets the benefit of the doubt.
• Thematic focus. One clear topic reads as expertise; a fourre-tout of unrelated niches reads as made-for-ads.

The order we recommend

When we prepare a site for review, we work in this order, and it is the same order our checker sorts its action plan:

1. Fix anything blocking: HTTPS, indexing, robots.txt, the four required pages.
2. Kill the thin pages: expand them, merge them or unpublish them.
3. Add the trust layer: about, author bylines, structured data, footer identity.
4. Then wait until you genuinely have 25+ solid indexed pages, and apply once.

One application done right beats three hasty ones. Repeated rejections do not blacklist you formally, but each one costs you a review cycle that can stretch to weeks.

If you were already rejected

"Low value content" is frustrating precisely because Google will not tell you which pages offended. Our reading of it, after seeing it on our own sites and others: it almost always means some combination of thin pages, tool-only sites without editorial content, and missing trust signals. Run the checker, fix everything red, then reread your five weakest pages as if you were a stranger. Improve or remove them. Wait at least two or three weeks of normal publishing before reapplying, so the site shows life between the two reviews.