On July 21, 2026, Google updated its Advertising Policies Help Center with an entry titled "Update to Appeals Limits." The change is straightforward: any policy decision made more than six months ago can no longer be appealed directly inside your Google Ads account.
No blog post. No product forum thread. No email to advertisers. According to reporting from ppc.land, the change appeared as a documentation update — the kind you find by reading changelogs, not your inbox.
The practical effect: an advertiser whose ad was actioned in November 2025 had a working appeal button on July 20. On July 21, that button was gone for that decision.
What "no appeal" actually means for your account
The Policy Manager still shows every disapproval. The record stays. What disappears is the self-serve path to contest it.
For decisions within the six-month window, nothing changes. You open Policy Manager, go to the Policy Issues tab, and select "Appeal" on the affected ad. That process is still intact for anything issued after January 21, 2026.
For anything older than that, your only documented option is contacting Google Ads support directly. No escalation path has been publicly disclosed. No exception process exists. The support queue for policy questions is the queue you're in, regardless of account size or spend level.
Which accounts are most at risk
Accounts running large product catalogs with automated feed submissions tend to accumulate policy decisions passively. It's common for e-commerce accounts to have disapprovals buried months deep that no one has actively managed. A significant portion of those are now outside the appeal window.
Accounts with a suspension or account-level action from the second half of 2025 are in a harder position. A broad policy action from Q3 or Q4 last year — misrepresentation, circumventing systems, billing issues — is now past the six-month cutoff for self-serve appeal. Support is the only route, and those cases are complex enough that queue response times become a real variable.
Agencies inheriting accounts face an operational change too. When you take over a client account with historical policy baggage, reviewing open appeal options used to be a standard first step. That option no longer exists for decisions made before the six-month window.
What to do before more decisions age out
Open Policy Manager. Under the Policy Issues tab, every current disapproval shows with its date. Sort by date and identify anything issued between late January and late April 2026. Those decisions are inside the window now but will pass the cutoff over the coming weeks.
File appeals on those before they age out. The direct path still works for decisions within six months. Start with the ones closest to the cutoff and work forward.
For anything already past six months, the approach is different. Contact support with specifics: the original disapproval date, the policy cited, and what changed since the decision. Documentation of the change matters. A general inquiry about a disapproval will not move things quickly. A clearly documented account of what was flagged and what you've done since is better.
There is no confirmed bypass. No priority path for larger advertisers. If support doesn't resolve it, the disapproval stays.
Why the no-notice rollout matters
Google has compressed the number of things advertisers can self-manage over the past two years. Settings default to automated. Controls get narrowed or buried. Now one more recourse narrows — and this one arrived without any advance notice at all.
Policy changes that reduce advertiser rights have generally come with some lead time: an announcement, a date to prepare for, a grace period. This update appeared as a documentation changelog entry on the day it took effect. Whether that's an isolated case or a shift in how Google handles policy reductions is worth paying attention to.
The appeal button was a tool most Google Ads managers have used at some point. For decisions older than six months, it's gone. The practical response is clearing your backlog now, while the window for self-serve appeals is still open.
Run the free Gromerce audit to surface open policy issues across your account before they pass the six-month line.
Sources: ppc land, Google Advertising Policies Help Center, July 2026
