Google Bolsters Ad Safety Efforts With Enhanced AI Tools

Google said Wednesday (April 16) that it strengthened its use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the ad safety realm to protect consumers and its advertising ecosystem by making more than 50 enhancements to its large language models (LLMs) in 2024.

“These updates sped up complex investigations, helping us identify bad actors and fraud signals — like illegitimate payment information — during account setup,” Alex Rodriguez, general manager of ads safety at Google, said in a Wednesday blog post announcing the release of the company’s 2024 Ads Safety Report.

“This kept billions of policy-violating ads from ever showing to a consumer, while ensuring legitimate businesses can show ads to customers faster.”

Rodriguez highlighted the company’s efforts to combat the use of AI-generated public figure impersonation ads. The company did so by developing countermeasures that include a new policy that suspends advertisers that promote those scams.

“As a result, we were able to permanently suspend more than 700,000 offending advertiser accounts,” Rodriguez wrote in the post. “This led to a 90% drop in reports of this kind of scam ad this year.”

The report outlined Google’s efforts in some other areas as well. These include advertiser identity verification, which provides transparency about who is behind an ad and prevents suspended bad actors from returning; advertiser policy enforcement, which prohibits content that Google believes to be harmful to users and the advertising ecosystem; restricted ads, which ensure that legally or culturally sensitive ads about things like gambling and alcohol are shown only to users in appropriate locations; and publisher enforcement, which helps publisher monetize their content while upholding their policies and restrictions, according to the report.

Overall, in 2024, with the help of AI, Google removed 5.1 billion advertisements, restricted 9.1 billion advertisements and suspended 39.2 million advertiser accounts, per the report.

“The ad safety landscape is constantly changing, reshaped by technological breakthroughs like advancements in AI, emerging abuse tactics and global events, demanding continuous agility from our industry,” the report said. “In this dynamic environment, we are meeting these challenges head-on, deploying cutting-edge technology and collaborating with partners to foster a safer online experience for everyone.”