Google today announced three new agentic safety features for Ads Advisor, its AI agent inside Google Ads, giving the tool the ability to flag and resolve complex policy violations, monitor accounts around the clock, and convert certification paperwork that previously took weeks into approvals measured in seconds. The announcement, published on April 21, 2026, on the Google Ads & Commerce Blog, was authored by Priya Baliga, Senior Engineering Director for Ad Platforms.

The capabilities are not yet live. According to the blog post, they will launch in the coming months and are currently available exclusively to English-language accounts globally, with additional languages rolling out soon.

What Ads Advisor already does

Ads Advisor has been part of Google Ads since its announcement at Google Marketing Live in May 2025. The tool reached all English-language accounts in December 2025, following a staged rollout that brought it to 50% of eligible users during Think Week in September 2025. From its initial deployment, Ads Advisor could generate performance reports, troubleshoot campaign delivery issues, interpret policy violations, assist with identity verification processes, and provide billing support - all through a conversational interface powered by Gemini models.

The agent was later expanded to Display & Video 360 users at Google NewFront 2026 in March, where Bill Reardon, General Manager of Enterprise Platforms, demonstrated its ability to diagnose creative rejections in seconds and manage complete campaign configurations from uploaded media plans.

The three additions announced today build directly on that foundation, but push into compliance and security territory the earlier versions did not cover.

Feature one: proactive policy troubleshooting

The most operationally significant of the three features is what Google calls proactive policy troubleshooting. It has two components.

The first is Real-Time Policy Reviews. According to the announcement, this provides instant, in-workflow guidance as advertisers create and edit campaigns - meaning the system surfaces potential policy issues during the editing process rather than after submission. The stated goal is to flag problems before they become violations.

The second component extends further. When issues do arise - at any point, not only during campaign creation - Ads Advisor will, according to the blog post, proactively scan the advertiser's account and website to identify the problem, provide a clear path to resolution, and then confirm the fix is complete before the advertiser submits an appeal.

This end-to-end troubleshooting capability will initially cover several of Google Ads' most complex policy categories: unacceptable business practices, circumventing systems, and counterfeit goods. More categories are described as coming later.

The significance of those three categories is not incidental. Circumventing systems violations are treated as egregious under Google's enforcement framework - they result in immediate account suspension without prior warning and permanent platform bans, rather than the graduated seven-day warning system that applies to less serious infractions. For advertisers operating in regulated or high-risk verticals, a policy violation in this category does not come with a grace period. Getting ahead of those violations before they occur is materially different from receiving a suspension notice.

Google cut incorrect suspensions by 80% in November 2025 using AI improvements that also resolved 70% of appeals faster, with 99% of cases handled within 24 hours. But even with those improvements, the appeal process remains reactive - it begins after an account has already been suspended. Proactive troubleshooting, if it performs as described, shifts that dynamic earlier in the workflow.

Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Product Liaison, framed the feature's purpose plainly in her LinkedIn post announcing it: "Let's be honest: troubleshooting policy compliance can be a time-consuming chore. To help fix that, we're bringing proactive policy compliance & account security insights and solutions to Ads Advisor, the AI agent in Google Ads. The goal is to provide clarity before you hit a roadblock."

Feature two: 24/7 security monitoring and passkeys

The second feature addresses account security through two distinct mechanisms.

The first is a new security insights dashboard inside Google Ads. According to the blog post, the dashboard will display an account's current security status, and Ads Advisor will monitor accounts continuously - around the clock - sharing personalised recommendations. Those recommendations will include actions such as reviewing flagged domains and auditing dormant users. The system will also show how adopting those suggestions improves the account's overall protection score. Advertisers can prompt Ads Advisor directly with the phrase "show me my security level" to get a snapshot of current status.

Auditing every user in a Google Ads account is described in the announcement as "a cumbersome and manual process that can take hours depending on the size of your team." The monitoring feature is positioned as a way to surface the same information continuously and automatically rather than requiring periodic manual reviews.

The second mechanism within this feature is the addition of passkeys to Google Ads. Passkeys are a passwordless authentication standard that uses device-based cryptographic credentials - typically biometrics or a PIN - instead of conventional passwords or one-time codes. According to the announcement, bringing passkeys to Google Ads removes the friction associated with passwords while improving login security.

The introduction of passkeys follows a pattern of account security updates at Google Ads. In 2024, Google introduced a feature allowing administrators to request users switch from personal email addresses to business domain addresses for managing accounts. That change was designed to associate account access with verifiable business identities. Passkeys go further by replacing the credential layer entirely.

Account security has been a recurring topic in the Google Ads community for reasons beyond authentication. In February 2026, attention focused on an authorisation clause embedded in Google Ads' standard support contact form that allowed specialists to make direct changes to advertiser accounts. The security dashboard and passkeys arrive as part of a broader set of updates to how access and account integrity are managed.

Feature three: instant certifications

The third feature targets a specific operational bottleneck: advertising certifications. Certain advertising categories - healthcare, gambling, financial products, government documents, and others - require Google Ads certification before campaigns can run. Historically, that process involved manual paperwork submissions followed by review periods that, according to the announcement, could stretch to weeks.

Ads Advisor will change that workflow in two ways. First, it will proactively determine whether an advertiser's business requires a certification, based on the advertiser's industry and country. Second, it will either grant the certification automatically or, if additional details are required, help the advertiser submit the application in a single click. As with all Ads Advisor actions, the system will ask for explicit approval before taking steps in the account.

The announcement specifies that this feature is "built with Gemini capabilities." The certification determination step - identifying whether a business needs a certificate before the advertiser has asked - represents the agentic element: the system acts on information it holds about the account rather than waiting for a user query.

The practical impact of compressing certification timelines from weeks to near-instant approvals is significant for advertisers entering new markets or expanding into regulated product categories. Certification delays create direct gaps in campaign schedules. Google's gambling advertising certification process, for instance, has been the subject of multiple enforcement and policy updates, with certification revocations now possible for Manager Accounts with poor policy health. The introduction of proactive certification management addresses a gap that has previously required manual oversight.

An older example illustrates the manual baseline: a 2024 video guide for government document certification described a two-step process with a 5 to 7 business day processing time before a certificate appeared in an advertiser's account. What Ads Advisor proposes to replace is precisely that kind of sequential, wait-heavy process.

The agentic AI framing

Google's blog post uses the phrase "agentic safety features" to describe all three capabilities, and the word "agentic" carries specific meaning in this context. Agentic AI systems take action autonomously within defined parameters rather than simply returning information in response to queries. In the case of these features, Ads Advisor scans accounts without being prompted, determines certification requirements without being asked, and confirms fixes are completed without requiring the advertiser to manually verify - all before the advertiser needs to intervene.

The blog post notes that Ads Advisor "will ask for approval before taking action in your account," which distinguishes the agent's role from fully autonomous operation. The human remains in the loop for consequential changes, but the work of identifying what needs doing, diagnosing why, and preparing the resolution path shifts to the system.

According to the announcement, "over the past few months, marketers have been using Ads Advisor to spark creative ideas, unlock new insights, drive stronger performance and so much more." The three new features represent a deliberate expansion from campaign optimisation use cases into compliance, security, and certification - areas where errors carry heavier consequences than a poorly performing ad group.

Context for the marketing community

The three features land at a moment when Google Ads policy enforcement operates at considerable scale. Google's 2024 Ads Safety Report, released in April 2025, showed 39.2 million suspended advertiser accounts - a 208% increase from the 12.7 million suspensions in 2023. The volume of enforcement actions means that even a modest reduction in incorrect suspensions or proactive catch rate translates to a large number of affected accounts.

The compliance overhead associated with maintaining Google Ads accounts has grown alongside that enforcement scale. Policy documentation has expanded, certification requirements have multiplied across verticals, and the consequences of violations have become more severe for certain categories. Google reorganised its dishonest behaviour policy documentation in August 2025 - one of several documentation updates that year designed to improve clarity without changing enforcement standards. Clearer documentation helps, but it still places the burden of interpretation on the advertiser.

What Ads Advisor proposes shifts part of that interpretive burden to the AI agent. Rather than requiring an advertiser to read policy documentation, identify which rules apply to their campaign, and determine whether their setup is compliant, the system performs those steps during the campaign creation workflow. That is a different kind of value from performance recommendations.

The launch timeline - "the coming months" - leaves the precise availability date unspecified. Ads Advisor is currently available to all English accounts globally, with additional language support described as rolling out soon. Google Marketing Live, which has historically served as the major annual announcement event for Google Ads, is scheduled for May 20, 2026, and may provide further detail on timelines and additional features.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google, through Priya Baliga, Senior Engineering Director for Ad Platforms. Ginny Marvin, Google Ads Product Liaison, shared the announcement on LinkedIn. The features affect all Google Ads advertisers using English-language accounts globally.

What: Three new agentic safety features coming to Ads Advisor: (1) proactive policy troubleshooting including Real-Time Policy Reviews and guided resolution for complex violations such as circumventing systems, unacceptable business practices, and counterfeit goods; (2) 24/7 account security monitoring with a new security insights dashboard and the introduction of passkeys to Google Ads; (3) instant certifications that use Gemini to determine certification requirements by industry and country and either grant them automatically or facilitate one-click applications.

When: Announced April 21, 2026. Features will launch in the coming months. Ads Advisor is currently available to all English-language accounts globally, with more languages rolling out soon.

Where: Inside Google Ads, accessible to all English-language account holders worldwide. The announcement was published on the Google Ads & Commerce Blog and shared by Ginny Marvin on LinkedIn.

Why: Policy compliance troubleshooting is a manual, time-intensive process for advertisers. Violations in categories such as circumventing systems carry immediate suspension consequences with no warning period. Certification workflows for regulated advertising categories have historically required days or weeks of manual paperwork. The three features aim to move these processes earlier in the campaign workflow and reduce the manual burden on account managers.

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