Free YouTube exclusion list builder
Drop in your Google Ads YouTube placement report. It screens every channel name against 627 terms, shows how much of your budget went to channels you may not want, and gives you a channel exclusion list you can paste straight into Google Ads.
Free, no signup, and your report never leaves your browser.
Drop your YouTube placement report here
CSV or Excel, straight from Google Ads. Make sure the export includes the channel name column, that is what gets screened.
Your file is read in this browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or seen by us.
Questions
Is my placement report uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read by JavaScript running in your own browser tab. It is never sent to our servers, never stored, and never seen by us. You can check this yourself by opening your browser devtools Network tab while using the tool: there is no upload request. That matters, because a placement report contains your spend.
Where do I get a YouTube placement report in Google Ads?
Go to Campaigns → Insights and reports → When and where ads showed, open the Where ads showed tab, and filter to YouTube. Set the date range to at least 90 days, because shorter windows hide the long tail, which is where the problems live. Download as CSV or Excel. Keep the channel name column, that is what gets screened, and keep the channel ID or URL column, because that is what Google Ads needs to apply exclusions.
Why does the download need channel IDs?
Google Ads matches YouTube placement exclusions on the channel ID, the string starting UC, and not on the channel name or the @handle. If your export has no ID column the tool still screens the names and shows you what it found, but it cannot build a list you can paste straight into Google Ads. Re-export with the channel URL included and it can.
What does it actually check?
Each channel name is screened against 627 terms across 21 categories. The brand safety categories follow the GARM Brand Safety Floor, the framework media agencies already report against: adult content, arms, crime, death and injury, piracy, hate, profanity, drugs, spam, terrorism and debated social issues. On top of that are suitability categories that are perfectly legal but often wrong for a given brand, like kids content, ASMR, gambling, gaming, religion and news, plus a category for content-farm inventory. It also notices structural signals that are not words at all, such as non-Latin scripts, emoji-heavy names and auto-generated naming.
What can it not tell me?
It reads channel names and nothing else, which is the price of never uploading your file. So it reliably catches channels that announce what they are, and it misses the ordinary-looking channel that posted something you would never advertise beside. More keywords cannot fix that, because the evidence is not in the name. Judging the rest means looking at what the channels publish, which is what the DisplayGG scorer does.
Will it exclude channels I actually want?
That is the risk we design hardest against. Terms are split into strong and weak. Only strong ones, where the name alone is close to conclusive, go into the exported list. Weak ones go to a review queue and are never excluded automatically. Terms that collide with ordinary names get demoted: "guns" was removed because of Guns N’ Roses, "ministry" because of Ministry of Sound. Every exported channel shows the exact term that matched, so you can overrule it.
Can I add my own keywords?
Yes, and you should. There are risks specific to your brand that have no place in a shared list: an airline cares about plane crashes, a bank about debt relief, anyone about a competitor name. Add them in the keyword box and they are screened alongside the built-in list. They stay in your browser like everything else.
How do I apply the list in Google Ads?
Go to Tools → Shared library → Exclusion lists → Placement exclusion lists, open or create a list, and paste the channel IDs one per line. Apply it at the account level so it covers current and future campaigns. Bear in mind that category and inventory controls usually do more work on YouTube than any hand-built channel list, because YouTube inventory grows faster than anyone can review it.