1. The four controls people call “the exclusion list”
Placement exclusions let you name websites, apps, YouTube channels and videos where your ads should not appear. They have existed in Google Ads for years. The confusion is not whether they exist, it is that four separate controls sit under similar names and cover different campaigns.
| Control | Where it lives | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Account-level excluded placements | Tools → Content suitability → Advanced settings → Excluded placements | Every campaign in the account, Performance Max included, plus Search partner websites |
| Placement exclusion lists | Shared library, applied to campaigns; manager accounts can share them with linked accounts | The campaigns or accounts you apply them to |
| Campaign or ad group exclusions | Inside a campaign, under Content | That campaign only. Performance Max has no self-serve placement exclusions, and Google says placement and topic exclusions are not generally available at campaign or ad group level in Demand Gen |
| Content suitability settings | Tools → Content suitability | Inventory type, sensitive content categories and excluded keywords. These are content rules, not a list of sites |
For most advertisers the first one is the answer. It is applied once, it covers campaigns created later, and it reaches Performance Max, which gives you no placement control inside the campaign itself. That is what makes a good list worth building: the marginal cost of adding a domain to it is close to zero.
What about Search?
A Google search results page is not a placement, so nothing here changes what happens on Search itself. Search partner websites are a different matter: they are placements, and Google documents that since March 2024 account-level and manager-account placement exclusions also apply to campaigns serving on the Search partner network, including Search, Shopping, App and Performance Max campaigns. If you have ever wondered why a domain you excluded still showed up in a Search campaign report, this distinction is usually why.
2. How to apply an exclusion list in Google Ads today
Checked against Google's documentation in September 2026. Google moves these menus regularly, so if a label has changed, search for “content suitability” inside Google Ads and look for excluded placements.
The account-level list, which is the one most people want
- Go to Tools → Content suitability → Advanced settings.
- Open Excluded placements.
- Choose Enter multiple placements and paste your domains, one per line. No protocol:
example.com, nothttps://example.com. - Leave off the
www.. Google notes that excludingwww.example.comdoes not extend to the site's other subdomains, whileexample.comcovers the domain. - Save, then re-open the list and confirm your entries are actually in it. Large pastes can partially fail, and a silently truncated list is worse than no list.
Google documents a limit of 20,000 placements per paste and 65,000 per account. Manager accounts can hold up to three shared placement exclusion lists of 250,000 entries each, which linked accounts inherit. Almost nobody reaches these numbers: a thorough audit of a mid-sized account usually produces a few hundred to a few thousand domains.
When a shared list is the better tool
Build a list in the Shared library instead when several accounts need the same baseline, when an agency maintains one list across clients, or when one campaign needs stricter rules than the rest of the account. Shared lists apply where you attach them, so they are also the place for exclusions you do not want applied account-wide.
YouTube behaves differently again. A list of domains will not exclude a YouTube channel; you need the channel ID. That is covered in the guide to YouTube exclusion lists. For Performance Max specifics, see Performance Max placements, and for the campaign type Display is moving into, see Demand Gen placements. If an exclusion you already added does not seem to be holding, work through the troubleshooting checklist.
Source: Google Ads Help: exclude placements at the account level.
3. What categories and sites to exclude
There are two types of exclusions: category-level and site-level. Category-level exclusions are the blunt instrument — Google lets you exclude broad content categories like "Tragedy and conflict" or "Profanity and rough language." Site-level exclusions are more precise and more powerful.
Category exclusions to apply immediately
Most brands benefit from excluding these categories in Google Ads brand suitability settings:
- Tragedy and conflict
- Sensitive social issues
- Profanity and rough language
- Sexually suggestive content
- Sensational and shocking content
Site types to build into your exclusion list
- MFA sites. Made-for-advertising websites — high ad density, thin content, built for programmatic revenue. The ANA estimates $770M in spend went to MFA publishers in Q2 2025 alone.
- Politically extreme sites. Sites with explicitly extremist editorial positions, regardless of political direction. Association risk is real even when the content is technically legal.
- AI-generated junk sites. A growing category — sites that use AI to produce large volumes of low-quality content designed to attract programmatic ads. Identifiable by content patterns, author signals, and ad density.
- Clickbait and misinformation sites. Sites that spread false information or use sensational headlines to drive clicks. Both a brand safety and suitability concern.
- Adult content sites. Any site featuring sexually explicit material. Most brand safety tools catch the obvious ones; the long tail requires manual review.
4. How to audit your existing placement reports
The first step is getting the data. In Google Ads:
- Go to Reports → Predefined reports → Other → Campaign URL performance.
- Set the date range to the last 90 days (or longer for more complete data).
- Download the report as CSV.
The report shows every URL where your ads served, with impressions, clicks, and cost. Sort by cost descending to identify where the most budget went.
Before scoring anything, it helps just to see the shape of the spend. Our free placement exclusion list generator reads that CSV in your browser — nothing is uploaded — and shows you how concentrated your spend is, how much went to placements that never converted, and which domains match common red-flag patterns. It also produces a deduplicated list in the format Google Ads expects.
Manual review of a large placement list is time-consuming and subjective. Automated analysis at scale — which is what tools like DisplayGG.com do — scores every domain on MFA risk, brand safety, and suitability in minutes.
What to look for when reviewing manually
- High cost, low engagement (high bounce rate or very low conversion rate)
- Unfamiliar domain names — many MFA sites use generic or slightly misspelled names
- Subdomains of large networks (e.g., content.example-network.com)
- Mobile app placements you didn't intend to target
- Sites with obvious brand safety flags when you visit them directly
Excluding is only one side of it. If you would rather name the sites your ads may appear on instead of chasing the ones they should not, see how to build an inclusion list, including where Google still supports it and a worksheet for the decisions.
5. Downloadable starter exclusion list
The list below contains around 200 domains that recur in the Display and PMax placement reports we have reviewed, last checked in September 2026. It is a starting point, not a verdict on any individual site: inclusion means a domain is worth your review, and some entries will be wrong for your brand. Read it before you apply it, and remove anything that does not fit.
Treat it as a head start rather than a finished list. It cannot contain the domains that matter most to you: your own placement report holds hundreds or thousands that are specific to your campaigns, and no generic list will ever include them. Pulling that report is the part that actually pays.
Enter your email to receive the CSV and import instructions for Google Ads.