Two categories of exclusion targeting disappear from the Display & Video 360 API and Structured Data Files on October 1, 2026, and creative uploads gain a mandatory field eleven days later. Google published the notice on Thursday, August 27, 2026, without a version bump.

Google set out three changes to the Display & Video 360 API and Structured Data Files in a post to the Ads Developer Blog on Thursday, August 27, 2026. All three are unversioned. None of them require developers to migrate to a new API release, and none can be avoided by staying on an older one.

The post was signed by Trevor Mulchay of the Display & Video 360 API Team, the author behind most DV360 developer notices over the past two years. According to the Ads Developer Blog, the changes "will take effect in October 2026" and may affect existing integrations, with full detail carried on the platform's Announced Deprecations page rather than in the post itself.

Two of the three land on October 1. The third lands on October 12.

What unversioned means in practice

Most Display & Video 360 API changes arrive attached to a version. Version 4 reached general availability on March 27, 2025, and v3 sunset on October 7, 2025, leaving v4 as the only supported major release. Version numbers give integration teams a migration window: code written against an older version keeps working until that version is retired.

Unversioned changes remove that buffer. They apply to every supported version at once, on the date specified. A team running a stable v4 integration that has not been touched in months will still be affected on October 1 if it writes exclusion targeting through the affected endpoints.

The same mechanism applies on the Structured Data Files side, where the changes hit column values rather than API fields. Structured Data Files, abbreviated SDF, are comma-separated files used to create and update campaigns, insertion orders, line items and ads in bulk. Agencies and in-house teams managing thousands of line items rely on them precisely because the alternative is manual editing in the interface.

The two targeting removals on October 1

The first change concerns digital content labels. From October 1, 2026, specific digital content labels can no longer be excluded through targeting. This affects the available options under TARGETING_TYPE_DIGITAL_CONTENT_LABEL_EXCLUSION in the API and the accepted values for the Digital Content Labels - Exclude column in Line Item Structured Data Files.

The second change concerns sensitive categories. According to the Ads Developer Blog, the majority of sensitive categories can no longer be excluded using targeting from the same date. The affected surface is TARGETING_TYPE_SENSITIVE_CATEGORY_EXCLUSION in the API, plus the Brand Safety Sensitivity Setting and Brand Safety Custom Settings columns in Line Item Structured Data Files.

The word "majority" is doing real work in that sentence. Google does not enumerate, in the announcement, which sensitive categories remain excludable and which do not. Integration teams that validate SDF column values against a hard-coded list will need the Announced Deprecations page to establish what still passes.

Both removals sit at the line item layer, which is where most day-to-day campaign configuration happens.

Digital content labels have been unwinding for two years

Neither removal is a surprise to anyone tracking the platform roadmap, but the timing has moved.

Google's Q2 2026 roadmap, published in June, put the deprecation of legacy digital content labels and sensitive category exclusions at an estimated August 2026, with "Content not yet rated" carved out and no automatic migration offered. The roadmap listed twelve changes across the quarter and identified the brand safety items as the most structurally significant. The API and SDF enforcement dates published on August 27 land in October, roughly two months later than the roadmap estimate. Teams that planned migration work around an August cutoff have received an unannounced extension rather than a fresh deadline.

The underlying classification system is old. Google labels URLs using digital content labels and sensitive topic classifiers, and the resulting signals feed Campaign Manager 360, Display & Video 360 and Google Ads alike, as PPC Land documented in its overview of how the system works. On DV360, sensitive topic classifiers have been usable for both reporting and pre-bid blocking. That dual role is what makes the exclusion removal more than a cosmetic cleanup: pre-bid blocking is a spend-control mechanism, not a reporting convenience.

The unwinding began in September 2024, when DV360 phased out digital content labels for YouTube campaigns and pointed advertisers toward inventory mode settings, placement exclusions and keyword exclusions instead. Two years later, the same logic is being applied to display, video, Connected TV and audio line items.

Google's stated replacement is a pair of newer controls: inventory modes and content themes. Those operate at a different granularity than a checkbox list of labels. Inventory modes bundle suitability into tiers, and the YouTube implementation of that tiering received MRC brand safety accreditation in June 2026 for in-stream and Shorts inventory bought through Google Ads and DV360. Accreditation covers the tiering; it does not restore the ability to exclude a named category.

The gap matters for buyers who have built exclusion logic around specific categories for compliance or client-mandated reasons. A financial services advertiser with a contractual prohibition on a defined content type cannot map that prohibition onto a suitability tier without accepting a broader or narrower blocking footprint than the contract specifies. Research published in July 2026 found that age ratings were missing for 60% of 4,346 AI companion apps in the app store data buyers rely on, a reminder that the inputs feeding category-level controls are themselves uneven.

The creative requirement on October 12

The third change is narrower and purely operational. From October 12, 2026, creating or updating YouTube responsive ads requires a business name and a logo when default values have not already been assigned to the parent advertiser. The affected workflow is the upload of Ad Structured Data Files.

This is the enforcement half of a change Google shipped two months earlier. The July 2026 DV360 API update added default business name and logo values to the Advertiser resource on July 23, 2026, alongside a synthetic content attestation field that arrived ten days before Article 50 of the EU AI Act became applicable on August 2. At the time, those default values were a convenience: set them once at advertiser level, and Demand Gen and YouTube responsive ads created without their own values would inherit them.

From October 12, the convenience becomes a dependency. Ad SDF uploads that carry neither the fields nor an advertiser-level default will fail rather than fall back to a blank.

Both fields are mandatory inputs for the format itself, with the business name capped at 25 characters and the logo required at a 1:1 ratio, 144 by 144 pixels minimum. Advertisers migrating off retired Display campaigns have already encountered this: Google's own migration guidance for the replacement of Display Ads with Demand Gen recommends including a business logo among campaign assets, and notes that logos and business names are pre-populated from advertiser settings where available.

The practical exposure is concentrated in automated creative pipelines. A team generating Ad SDF files from a product feed or a digital asset management system, for advertisers that predate the July advertiser-level defaults, is the group most likely to discover the requirement through a failed upload.

The migration burden is cumulative

The October changes arrive on top of an unusually dense year of DV360 platform work.

Demand Gen resource support in the API completed its phased rollout on June 24, 2026, after beginning on June 10. Partial Structured Data File Upload arrived on May 5, 2026, lifting the requirement that every line item file carry more than 120 columns. And on June 29, 2026, Google set a single sunset date of January 28, 2027, for SDF v9, v9.1 and v9.2, after which requests specifying those version strings return a 400 error and accounts defaulting to them are switched to v10.

That last item interacts directly with the October changes. A team migrating to SDF v10 between now and January will be rewriting column handling anyway. Doing that work before October 1 folds the exclusion column changes into an existing project. Doing it after means touching the same files twice.

Version churn has been the defining characteristic of the SDF product. Version 6 was deprecated in July 2024 with an April 2025 sunset. Versions 7.1, 8 and 8.1 were retired in March 2026. Version 9.1 reached general availability in September 2025, and v9.2 followed in the October 2025 API update. Roughly ten months separate the general availability of v9.1 from the announcement that it would be retired.

Where the questions go

Google directed developers with questions to the "Google Advertising and Measurement Community" Discord server, the same channel the company extended to cover DV360 API, SDF and Bid Manager API discussions on March 24, 2026. That consolidation moved DV360 developer support away from Google's public forums and Issue Tracker onto a platform without native RSS, a workflow gap for teams that monitor announcements through feed readers.

The announcement itself carries no quantified impact assessment, no count of affected line items, and no indication of how many advertisers currently rely on the exclusion targeting being withdrawn. According to the Ads Developer Blog, recommended actions for teams whose integrations are affected sit inside each change description on the Announced Deprecations page.

For the programmatic buying community, the substantive shift is not the October 12 creative field. It is the removal, at the API and bulk-file layer, of a category-level blocking mechanism that has been part of DV360 since the platform's early years, replaced by controls that classify inventory differently and cannot be mapped one to one. Campaigns configured before October 1 will need their suitability settings re-derived rather than translated.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google's Display & Video 360 API Team, with the announcement signed by Trevor Mulchay. The changes affect developers, agencies, in-house programmatic teams and marketing technology vendors maintaining integrations against the Display & Video 360 API and Structured Data Files, and the advertisers whose brand safety configurations sit inside those integrations.

What: Three unversioned changes. From October 1, 2026, specific digital content labels can no longer be excluded through targeting, affecting TARGETING_TYPE_DIGITAL_CONTENT_LABEL_EXCLUSION and the Digital Content Labels - Excludecolumn in Line Item Structured Data Files. From the same date, the majority of sensitive categories can no longer be excluded through targeting, affecting TARGETING_TYPE_SENSITIVE_CATEGORY_EXCLUSION and the Brand Safety Sensitivity Setting and Brand Safety Custom Settings columns. From October 12, 2026, a business name and logo are required when creating or updating YouTube responsive ads if the parent advertiser carries no default values, affecting Ad Structured Data File uploads.

When: The announcement was published on Thursday, August 27, 2026, through the Google Ads Developer Blog. The first two changes take effect on October 1, 2026, and the third on October 12, 2026.

Where: The Display & Video 360 API and Structured Data Files, across all markets where the platform operates. Because the changes are unversioned, they apply to every supported API version rather than to a single release.

Why: Google is retiring legacy category-level brand safety exclusions in favour of inventory modes and content themes, continuing a transition that began with YouTube campaigns in September 2024 and was set out in the Q2 2026 platform roadmap. The creative requirement enforces the advertiser-level default values introduced in the July 2026 API update, closing the path by which YouTube responsive ads could be uploaded without a business name or logo.