Not a Quality Score problem
Google updated its Limited Ad Serving policy on June 12, extending it to Google Search for the first time. If your immediate reaction is to check your Quality Scores, that's the wrong instinct — this is a separate system entirely.
Quality Score measures how relevant your ad is to a specific query. Limited Ad Serving is an account-level trust assessment that determines how freely you can compete in auctions. When your account fails that assessment, Google doesn't disapprove your ads or suspend your account. It caps the number of auctions you're eligible to enter on certain searches, quietly, without notification.
Your ads can be running with Quality Scores of 9 and 10 across every ad group and still be serving at reduced volume if your account's trust level falls below threshold.
The policy already applied to YouTube and other Google surfaces. As of June 2026, it covers Search — the highest-intent advertising surface in the channel.
What triggers the cap
The policy documentation and early analysis point to several account-level factors:
User feedback. Post-click signals feed into this assessment. If real users repeatedly flag your ads, report misleading destinations, or abandon after clicking, those signals accumulate at the account level and inform your trust score. A perfect QS on a keyword doesn't offset a pattern of negative user feedback on where those clicks go.
Branding clarity. Ads that reference other brands without clearly communicating the relationship are flagged. So are campaigns where the advertiser's identity is ambiguous from the copy alone. If a user can't immediately tell who they're dealing with from the ad, Google counts that as a risk factor.
Account history. New accounts start with limited trust. Accounts with recent policy warnings carry that history forward. The assessment also considers verification status and the integrity of your conversion tracking setup.
The 2028 timeline isn't a holding pattern
Full implementation rolls out gradually through 2028. That's easy to read as "nothing to worry about yet." It isn't.
Enforcement started this month. The gradual rollout means Google is applying the policy to subsets of traffic now and widening it incrementally over two years. Accounts being evaluated now include borderline cases, not just clear violators. The two-year window describes how long it takes to deploy at Google's scale, not a delay before it affects campaigns.
If you're running Search campaigns, you're already in the population being assessed.
What to check
Pull your Search Impression Share report by campaign, broken down by week. The pattern to look for: Impression Share drops that don't correlate with budget depletion, bid changes, or QS fluctuation. When impression volume falls without an obvious auction-side cause, Limited Ad Serving belongs on your diagnostic list.
Four things to address once you have the data:
Landing page experience. Page speed, checkout completion, and content accuracy all feed into user satisfaction signals. Google is tracking what happens after the click, and that data informs the trust layer.
Ad copy branding. Your name should be visible in the copy, not just the domain display. For campaigns using competitor keywords or category terms, the advertiser identity needs to be unambiguous.
Policy Manager. Check it in your Google Ads account. Any flagged item from the past 12 months is part of your account's history.
Conversion tracking quality. The policy assessment includes the technical integrity of your click tracking infrastructure. Broken or inconsistent conversion setup is now part of the trust signal, not just a Smart Bidding problem.
The diagnostic gap
Most conversations about low Search impression volume go: budget problem, bid problem, Quality Score problem.
Those are correct categories. They're also incomplete now. There's a fourth explanation that operates outside the standard diagnostic framework — and because Google doesn't send a notification when Limited Ad Serving activates at the account level, the signal is an absence rather than an alert. Impression Share that looks like budget pressure might not be.
The accounts most exposed are newer advertisers still building history, brands with ambiguous creative, and any account that's had policy flags or consistent user feedback problems in the past year.
If your Search campaigns are losing Impression Share you can't explain, the free audit at Gromerce surfaces where the gap is: budget, bid, quality, or something operating at the account level.
The standard QS checklist won't catch this one. Pull the Impression Share report first.
Sources: Search Engine Land, Google Ads Policy Help, PPC.land, Digital Applied, June 2026
