Data
Google Ads problems in 2026: 9,643 Reddit posts, counted
By the SpendCanary team · Published 2026-11-07 ·Download the CSV
Google Ads problems come up in about 1 in 6 Google Ads posts on Reddit. We counted 9,643 posts from 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2026: 1,613 of them mention at least one of the problems below, and the rest mention none. Three things stand out:
- Account suspended came up most: 321 posts, 3.3% of all posts, and themost mentioned in 3 of 4 quarters (broad match and irrelevant searches led in Feb to Apr 2026).
- AI Max mentions rose from 16 posts (6.7 per 1,000) in the first quarter to 50 (20.9 per 1,000) in the last, about three times as many. AI Max is a newer feature, so part of this rise is simply more advertisers using it.
- Click fraud and bots about doubled from February to July (33 and 38 posts, against 17 and 17 in the quarters either side), then fell back to 7.1 per 1,000. Hacked accounts stayed steady at about 7 per 1,000.
Which Google Ads problems came up most?
Each post counts once per problem it mentions, so one post can count for more than one problem.
| Problem | Posts | Share of all posts |
|---|---|---|
| Account suspended | 321 | 3.3% |
| Broad match and irrelevant searches | 265 | 2.7% |
| Money spent with no results | 247 | 2.6% |
| Google changing the account | 166 | 1.7% |
| Ads disapproved | 142 | 1.5% |
| AI Max | 128 | 1.3% |
| Conversion tracking broken | 118 | 1.2% |
| Search Partners and Display | 116 | 1.2% |
| Click fraud and bots | 105 | 1.1% |
| Advertiser verification | 98 | 1% |
| Location targeting | 66 | 0.7% |
| Account hacked or taken over | 64 | 0.7% |
| Spam or fake leads | 48 | 0.5% |
| Spent more than the budget | 38 | 0.4% |
| Performance Max spending on brand searches | 38 | 0.4% |
What changed over the year?
Posts per 1,000 in each quarter, so a busier quarter doesn't look like a rise. The quarters had 2,392, 2,339, 2,523 and 2,389 posts. Small numbers move a lot: a topic with a few posts a month can double by chance.
| Problem | Nov 2025 to Jan 2026 | Feb to Apr 2026 | May to Jul 2026 | Aug to Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Account suspended | 31.8 | 29.1 | 38.0 | 33.9 |
| Broad match and irrelevant searches | 24.2 | 32.1 | 23.8 | 30.1 |
| Money spent with no results | 20.9 | 27.8 | 30.9 | 22.6 |
| Google changing the account | 15.1 | 20.1 | 16.3 | 17.6 |
| Ads disapproved | 14.2 | 15.4 | 16.3 | 13.0 |
| AI Max | 6.7 | 9.8 | 15.5 | 20.9 |
| Conversion tracking broken | 11.7 | 12.4 | 12.3 | 12.6 |
| Search Partners and Display | 9.6 | 13.7 | 12.3 | 12.6 |
| Click fraud and bots | 7.1 | 14.1 | 15.1 | 7.1 |
| Advertiser verification | 9.6 | 10.3 | 11.5 | 9.2 |
| Location targeting | 7.1 | 7.7 | 7.9 | 4.6 |
| Account hacked or taken over | 7.5 | 6.0 | 6.3 | 6.7 |
| Spam or fake leads | 8.4 | 3.8 | 3.6 | 4.2 |
| Spent more than the budget | 3.8 | 3.8 | 4.4 | 3.8 |
| Performance Max spending on brand searches | 1.3 | 4.3 | 5.2 | 5.0 |
What these numbers can't tell you
- They count how often a problem is mentioned, not how many advertisers have it. A post asking how to avoid suspension counts the same as one about a suspension.
- Reddit isn't every advertiser. Many posts come from agencies and freelancers, and some are vendors promoting a tool. We didn't remove those.
- Matching words misses posts that describe a problem in other words, and catches some that only mention it.
- We counted posts, not comments.
- Some posts had been removed or deleted by the time we collected them (1,376 of those counted). For those we could only match the title.
How we counted
- Posts: posts in r/googleads (3,561), r/GoogleAdsDiscussion (2,513) and r/adwords (784), plus the 2,785 of 6,823 r/PPC posts that mention Google, since r/PPC covers every ad platform.
- Dates: 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2026 (UTC). Posts with the same title count once, so a post shared to several of these subreddits isn't counted twice. This also drops a few different posts with the same short title, such as "Help".
- Source: titles and post text from Arctic Shift, a public archive of Reddit. We didn't collect usernames.
- Matching: a post counts for a problem when its title or text contains these words:
- Account suspended
- suspend, suspended, suspension
- Conversion tracking broken
- conversions or tracking "not working", "stopped", "dropped", "not recording" and similar
- Ads disapproved
- disapproved, disapproval
- Advertiser verification
- advertiser or identity verification, verification failed or pending
- Account hacked or taken over
- account hacked, compromised or hijacked; unauthorised access or charges
- Click fraud and bots
- click fraud, invalid clicks, fake clicks, bot traffic, competitors clicking
- Spam or fake leads
- spam, fake or junk leads, calls or form submissions
- Money spent with no results
- wasted money or budget, burning budget, spent with no sales, leads or conversions
- Spent more than the budget
- overspending, overdelivery, charged more than the daily budget
- Broad match and irrelevant searches
- broad match, irrelevant searches, keywords or clicks
- Search Partners and Display
- search partners, Display Network, display expansion
- Google changing the account
- auto-apply, auto-applied, Google reps or account strategists
- AI Max
- AI Max
- Performance Max spending on brand searches
- Performance Max with brand searches, brand terms or brand exclusions
- Location targeting
- location targeting, presence or interest, ads outside the target area or country
Example threads
A few public threads behind the numbers:
- a six-year-old account suspended without notice (r/googleads)
- an agency that lost access to client accounts after a hack (r/googleads)
- conversions that suddenly dropped to zero (r/googleads)
- how advertisers try to prevent click fraud (r/PPC)
- a budget spent on irrelevant keywords (r/googleads)
- Google reps pushing AI Max (r/PPC)
- advertiser verification (r/googleads)
Using this data
You're welcome to quote these figures or use the CSV underCC BY 4.0: credit SpendCanary and link to this page. The licence covers our counts, not the Reddit posts behind them. The data comes from public Reddit posts, not from anyone's Google Ads account: SpendCanary's customer data isn't part of it.
If one of these problems sounds familiar, the free SpendCanary scan checks an account for several of them, including search partners, broken tracking, location targeting and irrelevant search terms.