AdSense Tips & Tricks
What Your Site Needs Before You Apply to AdSense
Lesson 2 of 5 ·
Most AdSense rejections are not mysterious. Google publishes what it looks for, and the common failures are the same handful of things. This is the pre-application checklist, drawn from Google's own eligibility and site-readiness documentation.
The hard requirements
Google's stated eligibility requirements are short:
- You must be at least 18. If you are not, a parent or guardian applies with their own Google Account and is paid.
- You must own the site, and be able to edit its HTML source. You need access to place the code snippet in the page
<head>, or to upload anads.txtfile to the root directory. If your platform does not allow either, you cannot complete activation. (Google also accepts Search Console site-ownership verification as an alternative route.) - Your content must be your own, original, and compliant with the AdSense Program policies. Scraped, spun, auto-generated filler or republished third-party content will not pass.
If you publish on Blogger or YouTube, you do not apply the normal way — you sign up through those products, and separate eligibility thresholds apply there.
What "enough content" really means
You will see "you need 20–30 posts" repeated everywhere. Google does not publish a post count. What its documentation actually asks is whether the site has unique, useful content that gives visitors a reason to be there, and whether it provides a good user experience.
The practical read: a small number of genuinely substantial pages that answer real questions beats thirty thin ones. Sites get rejected for "low value content" far more often than for insufficient quantity.
Pages you need
These are not optional decoration; missing policy pages are a routine rejection cause and, for privacy, a legal requirement in most jurisdictions.
- Privacy policy — required. It must disclose that third parties, including Google, use cookies and device identifiers to serve ads, and tell users how to opt out. Google's AdSense terms specify what this needs to cover.
- About — who publishes this site. Anonymity reads as low trust to reviewers and readers alike.
- Contact — a real, working way to reach you.
- Consent handling — if you have any traffic from the EEA, UK or Switzerland, Google requires a certified Consent Management Platform that supports the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework. This is enforced, not advisory. Google's own Privacy & messaging tool is one certified option.
Technical basics
- A real domain you control. Free subdomains on hosted platforms are frequently ineligible or handled through a host partner instead.
- Working HTTPS.
- Mobile-first layout. Most traffic is mobile and reviewers see the mobile experience.
- Reasonable load speed. Ads add weight; a slow site gets slower once they are live.
- Accessible to the crawler. No password wall, no
noindexon the pages you want monetised, nothing blocking Google inrobots.txt. - Clear navigation. A reviewer should be able to understand what the site is for in a few seconds.
Before you press apply
Do not apply on the day you launch. Publish enough real content that the site is obviously a going concern, make sure every page you would show a stranger is finished, and remove placeholder or "coming soon" pages entirely rather than leaving them live.
If the site is a local business site rather than a content site, ad revenue is almost certainly the wrong goal for it — visibility and enquiries are worth more. The 22-point local visibility checklist is the more relevant free resource in that case.
Next: what "quality content" means when a reviewer is the reader.
One useful next step
AI Starter KitFree. If the plan is to publish enough content to earn from it, this is the kit I use to draft faster without letting the writing go generic.