Malware & deception
Circumventing systems
- Ad Manager API value
- CIRCUMVENTING_SYSTEMS
What Google's rule says
Authorized Buyers states that the ad attempts to circumvent or interfere with Google's advertising systems and processes. The Ad Manager API records it as CIRCUMVENTING_SYSTEMS.
What actually causes it
- Cloaking — showing the review system one thing and users another.
- Text or images manipulated so that automated review reads them differently from a person.
- Content assembled at runtime specifically to avoid what the scanner sees.
- Verification or OMID domains substituted for ones outside the allowlist.
How to fix it
Make the reviewed creative and the served creative the same artefact. Any mechanism that changes what the ad shows after review is what this reason describes, whatever it was built for.
The part that is not obvious
This value and GAMING_GOOGLE_NETWORK sit next to each other in the enum and are easy to conflate, but they are aimed at different things: circumventing is about evading the review and enforcement machinery, gaming is about exploiting the network's economics. The consequence to know is that this one is treated as intent rather than error, so it does not clear the way a threshold breach does. Google's guidance for policy-violated creatives is unambiguous — a disabled creative is permanently disabled, and the route back is a new creative, not a repaired one.
Related reasons
Reason name and API value verified against Common ad disapproval reasons — Authorized Buyers Help on 30 July 2026 (Ad Manager SOAP API v202602). The causes and fix above are practitioner guidance, not Google policy text.