AdSense Requirements for a Website: The Approval Checklist

AdSense does not publish a checklist for websites. It publishes a handful of eligibility rules, a long list of content policies and a few paragraphs in the help center about what a reviewer looks at. Everything else you read online, including most “requirements” lists, is somebody’s experience presented as a rule. This guide separates the two, then gives the checklist we use on our own sites.

What Google actually states

The eligibility page asks for very little. You must be old enough to enter a contract (18, or have a parent or guardian apply), have a Google account, own the site and be able to edit its HTML so you can place the ad code, publish content Google describes as high quality and original, and follow the AdSense program policies.

What the page leaves out matters as much. As of 7 October 2026 Google publishes no minimum domain age, no minimum number of pages and no minimum traffic. Those numbers circulate widely and some may match what reviewers do in practice, but they are not requirements. A site that “fails” an invented threshold can still be approved, and one that clears all of them can still be refused.

We still recommend a page count, because a reviewer needs something to read. We say it is our recommendation, and we explain why below.

What the review actually weighs

Two Google pages tell you more than any forum thread. The first is the policy on ads on screens without publisher content, which the program calls valuable inventory. It says Google does not allow its ads on pages with no content or low-value content, on pages under construction, and on pages used for alerts, navigation or other behavioral purposes. It adds that your content should be the focal point of the page, and it lists auto-generated content that nobody reviewed or curated among the problems. Dead-end screens such as thank-you and error pages are named too.

The second is the help center’s advice for reviewing your site before you apply. It names three areas: unique content, navigation that people can use, and a layout that invites reading. The message you receive after a refusal is usually a short label, with “low value content” the best known, and little detail, so these two pages are the closest thing to a rubric you will get.

Then come the content policies, which every monetized publisher must follow. They cover illegal content, intellectual property abuse, dangerous or derogatory content, misrepresentative content, deceptive practices, enabling dishonest behavior (which includes hacking tools and surveillance) and sexually explicit material. If your site touches security, health or finance, read the matching section before you write rather than after a refusal. Our guide on sensitive niches goes through them.

The review itself runs in two stages, according to Google: account approval, where it verifies your payment information, and site approval, where it checks the site against the program policies. It says the process usually takes a few days, but in some cases it can take 2 to 4 weeks. Nothing you do shortens it, so use the wait to keep publishing normally rather than reworking the site.

The checklist we use

Beyond the official text, this is the order in which we check a site before anyone applies. It is our judgment, built from sites we run and from what our checker measures, and each item says whether Google states it or not.

1. Enough substance to judge. Google sets no page count, but a reviewer cannot approve what they cannot read. We recommend 20 to 30 indexed pages that each deserve to exist without ads on them. A homepage that says what the site is and who writes it counts for more than a hundred stub pages. If your site is mostly tools or calculators, the editorial layer around them is what is missing: how to build it.
2. The pages that show a person stands behind the site. A privacy policy that mentions advertising cookies, a contact page with a working method, an about page and a terms or legal notice, all linked from the footer and all indexable. Google states the privacy disclosure for ads and, as far as its public documentation goes, says nothing about the other three, but in our experience approved sites have all four. What each page must say.
3. Pages Google can see. AdSense reviews what is crawlable. Check the number of indexed pages in Search Console before you apply, look for stray noindex tags left from staging, and make sure robots.txt lets both Googlebot and Mediapartners-Google, the AdSense crawler, through. The robots.txt mistakes guide shows the usual traps.
4. Navigation that works. A menu a stranger can use, categories that open, no dead links, an honest 404 page and nothing marked “coming soon”. Google names navigation in its own self-review advice.
5. Technical basics. HTTPS everywhere with plain http redirecting to it, a layout that works on a phone because Google indexes the mobile version, pages that load in a reasonable time, and a domain you control so you can serve files such as ads.txt from its root.
6. A voice that is yours. Not republished, not spun, not pasted from a tool without review. Each page should tell the reader something the top results do not. This is the one item no tool can verify, and it carries most of the weight.
7. Policy-clean content. Nothing that falls into the policy categories above, including the less obvious ones: security content framed as intrusion instead of defense, copyrighted images and embeds, health or finance claims you cannot support.

Where you stand, measured

You can check most of this yourself in an afternoon, or let the AdSense eligibility checker do the measurable part and tell you what to fix first. It is useful to see what a clean result does not tell you. On 7 October 2026 we ran the checker on this very site before relaunching it: 95 out of 100, with HTTPS, indexing, navigation and mobile all green. The two checks that held the score down were the number of pages and the share of substantial ones. 14 URLs and 3 substantial pages per language is a technically perfect site that gives a reviewer almost nothing to judge, which is why we built the guides you are reading.

The mistakes we see most

• Applying with a handful of pages, most of them short.
• A privacy policy copied from a template that never mentions advertising or cookies.
• A noindex or a Disallow: / left over from the staging site.
• robots.txt rules that block the AdSense crawler.
• Placeholder pages, “under construction” notices and lorem ipsum.
• Text copied from other sites, or machine output published without anyone reading it.

If you were refused, do not reapply the next day. Find the pages at fault first: how to do that, and a three-week plan for the second attempt.