AdSense Approval Requirements: What Google Actually Asks For

01What does Google actually publish?

Four things, roughly. You have to be eligible to hold an account — age and location conditions, and one account per person. Your site needs content that is yours and that gives a visitor a reason to be there. It needs the disclosures required of a site that shows ads, which for most publishers means a privacy policy that covers advertising cookies. And it has to be reachable and reviewable, because a site that cannot be fetched cannot be assessed.

What is not published is the interesting part: no post count, no word count, no traffic minimum, no domain age, no menu structure, no required page list beyond the disclosure obligation. Those numbers circulate because a vague requirement is uncomfortable and a number feels like something you can finish.

Both halves matter when you read advice. If a checklist tells you the exact number of articles Google wants, it is describing what worked for somebody, not what Google asked for.

02The checklist, in the order a reviewer meets your site

Ordered by what blocks a review outright versus what a review weighs. There is no point improving content on a site the crawler cannot open.

• The site loads for someone who is not you — no login wall, no maintenance page, no firewall rule blocking unfamiliar crawlers. If a review reports the site as unreachable, start at site down or unavailable.
• Nothing tells search engines to stay away — no stray noindex, no robots.txt rule left over from staging.
• A privacy policy exists and actually covers advertising and cookies, which is narrower than having a policy at all: what an AdSense privacy policy has to disclose.
• A visitor can tell who runs the site and how to reach them: the pages reviewers look for.
• The content is yours, and each page adds something the pages already ranking do not: what low value content points at.
• The same material is not published several times over under different URLs: where duplication hides on an original blog.
• A stranger can navigate the site on a phone and reach your best article by clicking: navigation and structure signals.
• A reader can tell who is writing and why they would know: author information and E-E-A-T.
• Commercial pages disclose the relationship and add something beyond the merchant: affiliate links and ad-purpose sites.
• If your subject is health, money, or safety, the same expectations are read more closely: what YMYL means for your application.

03How many posts, how many words, how much traffic?

None of these have a published answer, and the three questions have the same shape: they ask for a threshold where the guidance describes a quality. The honest answer to all three is that a reviewer looks at what your pages offer, not at how many of them there are.

That is genuinely harder to act on than a number, which is why the numbers persist. How much content you actually need covers what the review appears to weigh instead, including why sites with thirty long articles still get turned down.

The same applies to how the content was produced. There is no rule against using AI assistance, and no published detector standing between you and approval — what Google's guidance says about AI content covers where that leaves you.

04The mistake we see most often

A pattern we see regularly across the blogs we review is treating the application as the thing to optimise rather than the site. Somebody applies, gets a vague rejection, changes whatever the loudest forum post named, and applies again the same week — then repeats that four times, each rejection reading as more arbitrary than the last.

Each of those reviews looked at the site as it stood, which had barely changed. Four rejections in a month is not four pieces of feedback; it is the same piece of feedback four times.

If you are in that loop, fix first or reapply is the more useful order of operations, and a rejection with no reason given covers how to work out which of these actually applies to you when the email does not say.

05What happens after approval

Approval is not the end state it feels like. The same policies keep applying to a site that keeps changing, and the sites that run into trouble later are usually the ones that treated approval as a finish line.

That is a different subject from getting in, and staying compliant after approval covers it separately. Worth reading once before you apply, so the habits start early.

06How to use this before you apply

The aim is to be able to say what your site offers and to have removed the things that stop a reviewer from seeing it. Nothing here is a guarantee, and none of it substitutes for reading Google's own published policies.

• Work the checklist above in order, and stop at the first item you cannot honestly tick.
• Open your own site logged out, on a phone, as a stranger would — most blocking problems are invisible to the owner.
• Read the specific guide for anything you are unsure about rather than acting on a general impression.
• Be sceptical of any service or article promising approval, since the decision is not theirs to make.
• Apply once you can name what your site offers a reader, rather than once you have hit somebody's number.