Weight & build
Maximum download size exceeded
- Published limit
- 5 MB total download
What Google's rule says
Google's stated rule is that the ad's download size exceeds the 5 MB limit. The figure is the weight of everything the creative pulls down, not the size of the file that was uploaded.
What actually causes it
- An HTML5 bundle that looks small in the ad server but fetches a web font, a poster frame and several vendor scripts at runtime.
- An uncompressed hero image or a background video that was never resized for display.
- A measurement or verification wrapper added after the creative was approved, pulling its own payload on every impression.
- A creative that loads all of its variants and then hides the ones it does not need.
How to fix it
Load the creative with the browser network panel open and read the total transferred figure, not the sum of the files you uploaded. The gap between those two numbers is almost always where the 5 MB went.
The part that is not obvious
This limit and the 100-call limit are measured on the same event — the creative running in a browser — so they are usually breached by the same code, and it is rarely the advertiser's code. A creative can be approved on upload and disapproved weeks later without anyone touching it, because a vendor changed what their wrapper fetches. That is why the first question on this reason is what changed in the tag chain, not what changed in the artwork.
Related reasons
Reason name, threshold verified against Troubleshoot creatives rejected by Display & Video 360 or Google Ad Manager on 30 July 2026. The causes and fix above are practitioner guidance, not Google policy text.