Malware & deception
Trick to click
- Ad Manager API value
- TRICK_TO_CLICK
What Google's rule says
The Ad Manager API defines TRICK_TO_CLICK as a creative designed to mislead or trick the user into interacting with it. Google's rejected-creatives guidance describes the same thing as an ad mimicking publisher content, site warnings or an operating system dialog.
What actually causes it
- A fake close button, or a real one placed where it is easy to miss and hit the ad instead.
- A play button on a static image that is not a video.
- An ad styled to look like the publisher's article list, navigation or comment section.
- Anything imitating a system alert, a download prompt, a battery warning or a virus notice.
How to fix it
Remove any element that imitates interface the user did not ask for — dialogs, warnings, close controls, play affordances on static assets. If a control looks interactive, it has to do the thing it looks like it does.
The part that is not obvious
The three examples Google names — publisher content, site warnings, operating system dialogs — are a ladder, and it explains why a creative can be disapproved for a design decision nobody thought was deceptive. Imitating publisher content is what native advertising does by construction, so the line is drawn at whether the imitation is disclosed. That makes this the reason with the most genuine grey area on the list, and the one where an appeal is worth writing: everything else here is a threshold or a string, and this one is a judgement about what a user would reasonably expect a control to do.
Related reasons
Reason name and API value verified against Ad Manager API — CreativePolicyViolation (v202602) on 30 July 2026 (Ad Manager SOAP API v202602). The causes and fix above are practitioner guidance, not Google policy text.