Meta is removing placement controls from ad sets. Advertisers started seeing a notice inside the Placements section of Ads Manager this week, first documented by Jon Loomer on August 20 and picked up the same day by Social Media Today. The wording is short and covers more ground than most people noticed on first read: “Excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems will no longer be available for your ad sets.”
If you manage a Meta account, that one sentence removes four separate levers you have probably used for years. Here is what goes, what stays, and what is worth doing before the change lands.
What is actually going away
Per the notice Loomer captured, four things disappear from the ad set:
Individual placement exclusions. No more unticking Audience Network, Facebook Marketplace, right column, Reels overlay or anything else on a per-ad-set basis. This is the one most accounts use daily.
Platform exclusions. You will not be able to run Instagram only or Facebook only from the ad set.
Device exclusions. No more mobile only or desktop only delivery.
Operating system exclusions. No more iOS only or Android only.
What Meta has not said
There is no date. Neither Loomer nor Social Media Today reports a timeline, and we have not found a Meta announcement attached to it. This is an in-product notice, not a published changelog entry, so treat anyone quoting a specific cutover day as guessing. If you see a date in your own account notice, that is your date, and it may not be everyone else's.
Meta has also said nothing about whether the account-level equivalent survives, which matters, because that is currently the strongest lever left. More on that in a moment.
Where this actually hurts
Honest answer first: for most accounts running conversion campaigns, less than you would think. Placement exclusions are one of the most over-applied settings in Meta advertising. Plenty of accounts strip out Audience Network on reflex, on every ad set, without ever having checked whether it was costing them anything.
The exception is real though, and it is specific. Loomer's point is that placements become a genuine problem when Meta can harvest cheap, low-quality optimised actions from them. That happens when your performance goal is easy to satisfy badly. Traffic campaigns optimising for link clicks or landing page views are the classic case. ThruPlay campaigns are the other, because Audience Network Rewarded Video sits inside apps that pay users in virtual currency to watch, which produces view counts that mean nothing.
So the accounts that should care most are the ones buying clicks, landing page views or video views. If that is you, losing the exclusion is a real change and you need a replacement lever. If you are buying purchases or leads with a conversion goal, this is closer to housekeeping.
The two levers you keep
Value rules. You can bid up or down by placement, device and mobile operating system rather than excluding outright. Loomer notes the practical limit: bid adjustments currently cover seven eligible placements, Audience Network among them. There is no value rule for platform, so Instagram-only delivery has no clean equivalent, though you can adjust bids on Instagram-specific placements. A value rule that bids a placement down hard is not the same as removing it, and it is worth being clear-eyed about that difference.
Account-level placement controls. This is the setting most advertisers have never opened. In Advertising Settings, under Account Controls, there is a Placement Controls option where you can switch on “My business can only advertise on specific placements” and untick placements for the whole ad account. Loomer walks through the steps. It is blunt, it applies everywhere, and it is currently the closest thing to a real exclusion you have left.
The 5% detail most accounts have missed
Worth knowing if you have been relying on ad set exclusions for brand safety. Since around October 2025, Meta has shown a checkbox in ad set placement controls called “Allow limited spend to excluded placements,” which lets Meta put up to 5% of budget into each placement you excluded. PPC Land reported that it appears on sales and leads campaigns, that it is on by default, and that the 5% applies per excluded placement rather than in total. So an ad set with several exclusions could already be sending meaningfully more than 5% of budget to placements you thought you had switched off.
Put plainly: if brand safety was your reason for excluding placements at the ad set level, that control has been partially leaky for months. The account-level setting is the tighter option, and this is a good week to check it.
This was signposted
The direction has been consistent. Meta removed detailed targeting exclusions in January 2025, citing 22% better campaign performance for accounts without them, as PPC Land documented at the time. Value rules launched in 2025 as the replacement mechanism for control. The 5% leak followed. And Mark Zuckerberg has described the destination openly, telling Ben Thompson in a 2025 Stratechery interview that the goal is a business connecting a bank account and stating an objective, with no targeting, creative or measurement input required.
You do not have to like that. It is useful to plan around it.
What to do this week
First, find out which of your exclusions were load-bearing. Pull a placement breakdown on your last 30 to 90 days. If a placement you have been excluding never spent, removing the exclusion changes nothing. If you cannot tell, you were excluding on reflex.
Second, check the 5% checkbox on every live sales and leads ad set. It is on by default. If strict exclusion matters to you, untick it now rather than after the ad set control disappears.
Third, set your genuine no-go placements at account level. Advertising Settings, Account Controls, Placement Controls. If Audience Network is a real brand safety problem for your business, this is where that decision belongs, not in fifty ad sets.
Fourth, fix the performance goal, not the placement. If you are excluding Audience Network because a traffic or ThruPlay campaign is producing junk, the placement is the symptom. Cheap low-quality actions will keep arriving from somewhere else. Move the campaign to a conversion goal you actually care about and the placement question mostly resolves itself.
The honest summary
This is a small change for well-run conversion accounts and a real one for anyone buying clicks or views. It also removes a comfort blanket that a lot of accounts have been holding without checking whether it was doing anything, which is a useful thing to discover either way. The same pattern showed up when Meta removed the off-platform opt-out: the platform takes a control away, reported numbers shift, and accounts without a baseline cannot tell what changed.
If you are not sure whether your exclusions were protecting margin or just protecting a habit, that is one of the things our free 15-point Profit Audit looks at, alongside signal health, audience structure and whether your reported results survive contact with your bank account. You keep the findings either way.