If your Google Ads account has ever been hit with a disapproval, a restriction, or a suspension you planned to fight, there is now a deadline on fighting it. On July 21, Google added a six-month limit on appeals to its policy documentation, switched it on the same day, and skipped the usual advance warning. For a big chunk of your account history, the appeal button no longer does anything.
What Google actually changed
Google added one line to its appeals documentation: “Starting July 21, 2026, the option to appeal a policy decision directly from your Google Ads account will not be available for policy decisions made more than 6 months prior.” You can read it on Google's own help page for fixing a disapproved ad or appealing a policy decision. That single sentence is the entire substance of the change.
There was no blog post, no video, no product-liaison thread. Google posted the notice in its Advertising Policies Help Center change log and enforced it on the same date. As PPC Land reported, that is a sharp break from Google's normal habit of building 16 days to two months of lead time into policy changes. Here there was no schedule. The restriction applied the day it was written. Search Engine Roundtable flagged the same wording the morning after.
The clock attaches to the date of the policy decision, not the date you found out about it. So a disapproval issued in November 2025 was appealable in your account on July 20 and unappealable on July 21. Read literally, the rule swept the entire pre-January 2026 enforcement record out of the in-account appeal path on day one.
Why this matters more than it sounds
“You still get six months” sounds generous. The problem is what starts the clock. Enforcement inside Google Ads is often invisible until you go looking for it. A disapproved asset buried in a Performance Max campaign, a policy flag on a single ad variant, a restriction on one product category. These can sit unnoticed for months, especially in accounts nobody audits every week. The six months runs the whole time, whether or not you have seen the decision.
And the volume is not small. Google's own 2025 Ads Safety Report recorded 24.9 million advertiser account suspensions in a single year, most of them made by automated systems, as documented here. Google has acknowledged that some of that enforcement hits legitimate advertisers by mistake. In November 2025 it said new AI systems had cut incorrect suspensions by more than 80 percent and that 99 percent of appeals now resolve within 24 hours. Both figures are Google's, and the 80 percent is measured against a baseline Google did not publish, so treat it as directional rather than exact. The point that survives either way: wrongful enforcement exists, appeals are the mechanism built to correct it, and that mechanism now expires.
What this means for your ad account
Two groups should pay attention, for different reasons.
If you run a clean, actively managed account, this is mostly a housekeeping prompt. Go check whether anything is sitting disapproved or restricted that you never got around to resolving, and clear the backlog before it ages out.
If you have inherited an account, switched agencies, or run a portfolio where no single person watches every sub-account, this is the one that bites. Ownership changes and agency handovers routinely surface old restrictions long after the fact. A product line that never gained traction on Google might trace back to a disapproval nobody caught at the time. Under the old rules you could still contest it. Now, if the decision is older than six months, the in-account appeal no longer applies to it. This is the same pattern we flagged when Google's AI content labels started rolling out: the platform keeps shifting responsibility onto the advertiser and expects you to keep up on your own.
One thing worth keeping straight. This change is specifically about the appeal path inside your account. Google's notice does not spell out whether support-mediated escalations, or the separate forms used for account suspensions and limited ad serving, are affected the same way. So a decision that has aged out of Policy Manager may still have a route through Google Ads support. It is just no longer the one-click path.
What to do about it this week
Four actions, none of which need new tools.
First, open Policy Manager and read it end to end. Look at every campaign, not just the ones currently spending. Note any disapproved ads, restricted assets, or flagged product categories, and check the decision date on each. You cannot beat a deadline you have not measured.
Second, appeal anything contestable now, oldest first. If a decision is approaching six months, it is the most urgent, because the window closes on the decision date, not on today. Keep in mind that Policy Manager allows a limited number of appeals per ad, so make the first one count with a clear, specific reason rather than a blind resubmit.
Third, put a recurring check on the calendar. The lesson of a zero-notice, date-based rule is that discovery is now your job, and it has a deadline. A monthly ten-minute pass through Policy Manager stops any future decision from aging out before you notice it. This is cheap insurance against an expensive surprise.
Fourth, if an important decision has already passed six months, do not assume it is dead. Go through Google Ads support rather than the in-account button, and keep your evidence and dates organised in case the escalation asks for them. An aged-out decision is harder to fight, not automatically impossible.
The honest summary
This is a small change with a sharp edge. It does not stop a single ad from running, and for a well-run account it is barely an inconvenience. But it moves the burden of catching enforcement onto you, gives you a fixed deadline measured from an event you may never have seen, and does it for the oldest and least-watched part of your account history. The advertisers who get hurt here are the ones who were not looking.
If you are not sure what is sitting disapproved or restricted in your Google Ads account right now, that is exactly the kind of thing our free 15-point Profit Audit surfaces, alongside your tracking, audience and measurement health. We read your account and show you what is flagged, what is leaking, and what we would fix first. You keep the findings either way.