Important Pages for AdSense Approval, and What to Write

Of the 4 pages that every AdSense checklist tells you to publish, Google’s documentation spells out the content of only 1: the privacy policy. We found no Google page that asks for a contact page, an About page or terms, so everything below about those 3 is our experience, and we label it each time.

The privacy page therefore has to contain particular statements, while the other 3 have no required text. That freedom is a trap: a generic page reads like a template because it is one, and a short page that names a person and a method is safer than a long one that could belong to any site.

The page Google writes the rules for

Google’s help page on privacy policies lists what yours has to tell visitors. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s earlier visits to your site or to other sites. Google’s use of advertising cookies lets it and its partners serve ads based on visits to your sites and to other sites on the Internet. And visitors can opt out of personalized advertising in Google’s Ads Settings. If you leave third-party ad serving switched on, you owe visitors more: identify those vendors, link to their sites and say that visitors can opt out there. Google also cites aboutads.info as another place to opt out.

Google adds 2 things that save you a long search. The wording varies by jurisdiction, and Google provides no model text. You write the statements yourself, then describe what your site really does: server logs, forms, analytics, comments, embeds. Our privacy policy generator inserts the Google statements when you tick advertising and builds the rest from your other ticks, and the guide to writing the policy covers the GDPR structure behind it.

Keep the policy and the consent banner apart in your head. The policy is a text everyone can read. Consent for visitors in the EEA and the UK is a separate mechanism, a banner that records a legally valid choice, and cookie consent explains it.

The 3 pages Google leaves to you

The eligibility page asks for an adult, a Google account, ownership of the site, access to its HTML, high quality original content and compliance with the program policies. Contact, About and terms are not on the list. We publish them anyway for a reason borrowed from Google’s helpful content guidance, which asks Who created the content, with clear authorship information, and How, with transparency about how it was produced, AI included (our guide to E-E-A-T for small publishers goes further). On a small site these pages are where both answers live. Our own checker has a category of 6 checks for required pages (the privacy policy with its advertising wording, contact, about, terms, and whether they can be indexed), and the methodology says which of its thresholds are ours and not Google’s.

Here is what each page needs, with the mistake that is easiest to make. Only the first row is a Google requirement.

Check what your country requires of a publisher before you write the terms or legal notice: some countries make a publisher notice a legal duty, and a copied template will not satisfy yours.

The last 2 rows lean on Google’s guidance, which warns against fake qualifications and AI-generated author profiles and asks for transparency about production. Ours are the editorial policy and the about page, and they say plainly that drafting is done with AI assistance. That matters because Google names auto-generated content that nobody reviewed or curated among the problems on the screens where it will not serve ads.

A weak About page and a strong one

Google’s policy on misrepresentative content forbids content that misrepresents or conceals information about the publisher, the creator or the purpose of the content. An About page is the first place a small site can break that rule by accident, usually by sounding bigger than it is. Imagine a calculator site called Sumsmith (the name and every detail are invented for this example). This is the About page most sites ship:

Welcome to Sumsmith! We are a team of passionate professionals dedicated to bringing you the best free calculators on the web. Our mission is to make your life easier with innovative, user-friendly tools. Whether you need a mortgage calculator, a savings planner or a loan comparison, we have got you covered. We are committed to quality, accuracy and customer satisfaction. Thank you for visiting, and do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!

And this is the same site with something to say:

Sumsmith is written and maintained by Dana Okoye, who spent 9 years in mortgage underwriting before building the first calculator here to check her own refinancing. Each calculator shows its formula, its rounding rule and the date its rates were last reviewed. If a result differs from your lender’s, send both figures to the address on the contact page and the fix goes into the dated changelog. No ads run on the site today, and this page will say so before that changes.

Swap the name in the first version and it fits any site. The second names a person (Who), says how the numbers are produced and checked (How) and gives a reason for the site to exist (Why), the same 3 questions Google’s guidance poses. It also commits to something a reader can test: send 2 figures, watch for the fix in a changelog.

Every detail in the strong version has to be true for your site. Copying its structure with invented credentials is worse than the weak page, because false information about the publisher is exactly what the policy forbids.

Make sure Google can read them

A page that exists but cannot be reached does nothing for you. Check 4 things, in this order:

1. Link all 4 pages from the footer of every page with plain <a href> links. Google crawls only <a href> links, not an onclick handler or a span, and it prefers descriptive anchor text to “click here”. Placing them in the footer is our habit, not a Google rule.
2. Keep them free of noindex and Disallow. No noindex in a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header, and no Disallow rule covering their paths.
3. List them in your sitemap with absolute URLs.
4. Confirm a plain 200 from each one, not a redirect chain.

# status code, then any X-Robots-Tag header
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://example.com/privacy/
curl -sI https://example.com/privacy/ | grep -i x-robots-tag
# any robots meta tag in the HTML
curl -s https://example.com/privacy/ | grep -io '<meta[^>]*robots[^>]*>'

The last 2 commands should print nothing, or a robots tag that says index. Anything containing noindex is the problem, and in our experience a staging setting carried over to production is a common source. Run the AdSense eligibility checker afterwards: it reads your privacy, contact, about and terms pages once each, checks their content and tells you if any of them cannot be indexed. The requirements checklist shows where these pages fit in the wider review.