An inclusion list is a set of websites, apps, channels or other placements that an advertiser designates as the only places a campaign may run. Anything missing from it is ineligible, however cheap, relevant or well scored the impression might be. It inverts the default of automated buying, where every impression offered is a candidate until a filter removes it. The same object has been called a whitelist, allowlist, site list or target list; inclusion list is the term advertiser bodies adopted after 2020. PPC Land's glossary entry on allowlists describes a list of specific sites, publishers or apps where an advertiser is willing to appear.

It exists because programmatic supply is, for practical purposes, unbounded. Campaigns in the Association of National Advertisers' 2023 transparency study ran across 44,000 websites on average, a population no buyer can inspect by hand. Excluding the bad parts of an open-ended pool never finishes; naming the acceptable parts does.

How the list is enforced

The inclusion list is a buy-side instrument. It sits inside a demand-side platform (DSP) or a self-serve ad platform, and it is checked before any bid is calculated. When a supply-side platform (SSP) sends a bid request under the OpenRTB protocol, the request describes the opportunity: for web inventory, a site object carrying fields such as site.domain and site.page; for apps, an app object carrying the bundle identifier and store URL. The DSP compares those declared values with the list. A match keeps the impression in play; a miss drops it before pricing runs.

The unit of matching decides how much the list actually controls. Buy-side lists are generally keyed to domains rather than pages, so an entry such as example.com admits every page on that registrable domain, the careful reporting and the slideshow templates alike. Google's Display & Video 360 (DV360) permits finer grain: URL targeting there reaches two levels of subdirectory and up to five levels of subdomain.

In DV360, reusable lists are called channels. According to Google's DV360 help centre, a channel can act as a preset list of brand-appropriate publishers for inclusion, a list of strong performers for optimisation, or a list of places to avoid. As of September 2026, each channel holds up to 65,000 websites or apps. Partners may keep 1,000 channels for targeting plus 10 for blocking; advertisers get 1,000 plus five. A line item can target a combined 10,000 individual apps and URLs directly, beyond which channels are required, according to Google's targeting documentation. In the DV360 API, channels are Channel resources, created under a partner or an advertiser and applied through the targeting type TARGETING_TYPE_CHANNEL.

Defaults widen a list beyond its literal text. According to Google, targeting a website in DV360 also targets the publisher's corresponding mobile or connected TV (CTV) app unless environment settings exclude apps. Some CTV bundles also use a generic identifier covering several apps from one parent company. CTV apps joined DV360's app and URL targeting in late 2021; before that, buyers assembled channels of CTV app IDs by hand.

Google Ads handles the equivalent through placement targeting in Display and Video campaigns. Google's help pages require at least 10 YouTube channels or videos before such a campaign can be saved, and warn that popular placements may need higher bids. They also state that when several content methods are set in one ad group, ads can serve on content matching any of them, so a placement list combined with topics or keywords behaves as a union rather than a restriction. Microsoft Advertising ran a targeted website list in open beta as of August 2025, available on request, beside exclusion lists holding up to 10,000 domains each.

Agency trading desks, in-house teams and verification vendors build the lists, usually from delivery logs and verification reports, and layer them over platform controls and third-party segments. Publishers hold no switch; their influence runs through sales teams asking to be added.

Origin and evolution

Choosing sites by name is older than real-time bidding. Google opened a beta of site targeting in AdWords on April 25, 2005, letting advertisers pick sites in its content network and pay per thousand impressions, according to eWEEK. The AdSense blog dated the full launch to that June.

Open exchanges made the opposite approach the norm until 2017. After a run of reporting on ads beside extremist videos and fake news sites, JPMorgan Chase cut its display activity from about 400,000 websites a month to roughly 5,000 pre-approved ones, the New York Times reported on March 29, 2017. Of the 400,000 addresses, only 12,000, or 3%, had produced activity beyond an impression over 30 days, according to Warc. "It's only been a few days, but we haven't seen any deterioration on our performance metrics," Kristin Lemkau, the bank's chief marketing officer, told the paper. The list did not stay that tight. By October 2017 the bank ran on about 10,000 sites, according to Digiday.

The same year supplied a precondition. An inclusion list trusts the domain declared in the bid request, and domain spoofing made that declaration unreliable. The IAB Tech Lab published ads.txt in May 2017 so buyers could check whether a seller was authorised. It did not close the gap: DoubleVerify has counted more than 100 cases of ads.txt manipulation since launch.

The name changed in June 2020. After Jerry Daykin, then a media director at GSK, urged the industry on LinkedIn to drop the old terms, Stephan Loerke, chief executive of the World Federation of Advertisers, replied: "We've decided at WFA to drop black [and] white lists from our vocabulary. We call them inclusion [and] exclusion lists from now on," according to Digiday. Tanya Joseph, a communications consultant, had pressed the point since 2017 while advising ISBA, the UK advertisers' body.

The strongest institutional endorsement came in December 2023. The ANA study found only 36% of post-transaction programmatic budgets reaching valid, viewable, measurable impressions outside made-for-advertising (MFA) sites, and recommended that advertisers prioritise inclusion lists over exclusion lists.

Why it matters

For marketers the list is a budget decision: it fixes which publishers can earn from a campaign at all. It is also a statement of buying strategy. A shared list reveals where an advertiser or agency buys, which makes it commercially sensitive whenever it is shared with a vendor.

Its reach is shrinking in automated products. Performance Max offers no way to hand-pick placements, so exclusion lists are the main placement lever there, extended to account level in January 2026. An exclusion list can travel into an automated campaign. An inclusion list, by definition, cannot.

Limitations and disputes

Scale and price. Every buyer with a conservative list competes for the same well-known domains, and Google's documentation acknowledges that popular placements may need higher bids.

Declared identity. The list checks a label, not the page. Ads.txt, sellers.json and the SupplyChain object narrow the room for spoofing without removing it, and a domain listed in good faith can change hands or change content.

Granularity. Domain-level entries approve sites, not impressions, and one domain may carry both journalism and arbitrage templates.

Gamed criteria. Lists built from verification scores inherit their blind spots. Analysis by TAG, the ANA and Fiducia found AI-generated inventory graded premium more than 70% of the time, with lower invalid traffic than clean supply and a higher TrueCPM.

Politics. Lists can concentrate money in ways regulators now examine. The Federal Trade Commission's final consent order clearing Omnicom's acquisition of IPG, approved on September 26, 2025, bars Omnicom from using exclusion lists, inclusion lists or other methods to differentiate publishers on political viewpoints, external journalistic standards or diversity commitments, except at an individual client's express direction. Individual advertisers remain free to set such lists. The order targets coordination across clients.

Long-tail effects. Smaller publishers rarely make default lists. When Chase widened its roster, Ken Van Every, a programmatic business development manager, told Digiday the expansion probably accommodated requests from publishers asking to be added. Access, in that account, depends on lobbying as much as on quality.

Not the same as

Blocklist or exclusion list. The inverse instrument: everything is eligible except named entries. Exclusion scales to automated campaigns; inclusion does not.

Brand lists. In Google and Microsoft search products, brand inclusions define which branded queries an AI Max campaign may match. They govern search terms, not the sites where ads appear.

Curation and deal IDs. Curation packages inventory and data into a deal ID on the sell side before a request reaches a buyer. An inclusion list filters on the buy side, and can be applied to open-auction or deal traffic alike.

Influencer allowlisting. Creator marketing uses allowlisting for permission to run paid advertising through a creator's account, an unrelated contract right, according to Digiday.

Recent developments

Placement controls are thinning in closed platforms while list-shaped controls multiply elsewhere. Advertisers reported on August 25, 2026 that some Meta accounts had lost the placements control, leaving value rules capped at a 90% bid decrease and account-level block lists as the only hard boundary. OpenAI added a platform targeting setting for ChatGPT ads, documented on August 20, 2026, that functions as an inclusion list rather than a bid modifier. Microsoft launched AI Max globally on August 19 with brand inclusions and up to 20 brand lists per campaign, and Google's September 1 migration carried existing brand inclusion and exclusion lists into AI Max in place.

Adelaide's free Media Quality Calculator, covered today, grades uploaded lists of 200 to 100,000 domains or app bundle IDs against attention benchmarks. Its 200-row minimum rules out tight inclusion lists.

Timeline

  • April 25, 2005: Google begins a beta of AdWords site targeting, letting advertisers choose content network sites on a CPM basis
  • June 2005: Site targeting launches to all AdWords advertisers
  • March 29, 2017: The New York Times reports JPMorgan Chase cut display advertising from about 400,000 sites a month to about 5,000
  • May 2017: The IAB Tech Lab launches ads.txt to counter domain spoofing
  • October 2017: JPMorgan Chase's site roster reported at about 10,000
  • June 2020: The World Federation of Advertisers replaces whitelist and blacklist with inclusion and exclusion lists
  • Late 2021: CTV apps added to DV360's app and URL targeting
  • December 2023: The ANA transparency study recommends prioritising inclusion lists over exclusion lists
  • September 26, 2025: The FTC approves the Omnicom-IPG consent order restricting viewpoint-based inclusion and exclusion lists
  • January 2026: Google introduces account-level placement exclusions spanning Performance Max, Demand Gen, YouTube and Display
  • August 19, 2026: Microsoft Advertising launches AI Max globally with brand inclusion lists
  • August 20, 2026: OpenAI documents platform targeting for ChatGPT ads
  • August 25, 2026: Advertisers report losing Meta's manual placements control
  • September 1, 2026: Google migrates legacy broad match campaigns to AI Max, preserving brand inclusion lists
  • September 20, 2026: Adelaide's Media Quality Calculator for domain lists reported

Summary

Who. Advertisers, agency trading desks and verification vendors build and maintain inclusion lists; DSPs such as DV360, Amazon DSP and The Trade Desk, and platforms such as Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, enforce them. Publishers are affected but hold no control beyond asking to be added. Industry bodies including the ANA and the WFA shaped the practice and its name, and the FTC now constrains how large agencies may apply lists.

What. A buyer-defined list of domains, apps, CTV bundles, channels or videos that a campaign is permitted to bid on, with all other inventory ineligible. It is the inverse of a blocklist.

When. Site selection appeared in Google AdWords in April 2005, became a mainstream programmatic control after JPMorgan Chase's cut in March 2017, was renamed from whitelist in June 2020, and was endorsed by the ANA in December 2023.

Where. Inside DSP line item and advertiser targeting, as channels in DV360, as placement targeting in Google Ads Display and Video campaigns, and as targeted website lists in Microsoft Advertising. It has little purchase in fully automated products such as Performance Max or Meta's Advantage+ placements.

Why. Open programmatic supply is too large to police by exclusion, and the 2023 ANA study found most budgets failed to reach quality impressions. Naming acceptable inventory trades scale and price for control, at the cost of trusting declared domains, concentrating spend and inheriting whatever criteria built the list.