Deductions from earnings FAQs

Your earnings were deducted because we detected invalid clicks and impressions or activity that was not in compliance with Google policies, either on your owned and operated sites or your network partners' sites. Google periodically reviews accounts for such activity. When we find such activity in your account, we adjust your earnings and reimburse the advertisers who paid for these clicks.

In rare cases, your earnings were deducted because we could not collect payments from certain advertisers. These advertisers may have used stolen credit cards or otherwise defaulted on payments. When this happens, we have to deduct the related revenue from publishers on whose content those advertisers’ ads appeared.

Unfortunately, you can't appeal the deduction. Please be assured that we have applied due diligence in reviewing the traffic in your account. As mentioned, a deduction is issued when we find invalid clicks in your account, when we find activity that's not in compliance with Google policy, or when advertisers who default on payments to Google have served ads on your AdSense content.

The estimated earnings you see in your account give you a close estimate of recent account activity as and when traffic is accrued in your account. The finalized earnings, on the other hand, include all revenue you'll be paid for validated clicks and impressions, minus revenue from advertisers who default on payments to Google and whose ads were served on your content.

On some occasions, Google may notice that activity you've already been paid for is invalid or not in compliance with Google policy, or that you were already paid for traffic from network partners that were disabled for invalid traffic or for activity that was not in compliance with Google policies. In such cases, Google posts an adjustment to your account in the form of a deduction.

We're unable to provide the date range for which your adjustment was issued. Per our Google Ad Manager Partner Guidelines, we credit advertisers for invalid traffic accrued 60 days prior to the date of invoice. Once we complete our investigation and begin processing these credits, it may take 30 days or more for the deduction to appear in your account.

To maintain the integrity of our invalid activity detection system and to prevent users from circumventing the system, we aren’t able to provide details on what activity we noticed in your account.

We encourage publishers to continuously monitor their Ad Exchange (AdX) accounts for potential signs of invalid clicks and impressions.

It's important for you to know where your traffic comes from, and we recommend monitoring your traffic regularly.This can be done using a web analytics tool like Google Analytics.

If you notice any suspicious activity in your account, you can notify us using our online form. Please share as detailed information as possible via the form. Note that we'll keep this information in our records, but we may not respond unless we find a significant issue with your account.