EU removes 1.6bn ads in 2025, Google report reveals tightening gambling oversight
Google’s Global Ads Safety Report 2025 shows that the EU removed more than 1.6 billion ads last year and blocked around 2 million advertiser accounts for repeated violations, with most of them never shown to users thanks to Google’s Gemini AI. Europe is second only to the US, where 1.7 billion ads were removed and 3.3 million accounts suspended. Across all markets, Google blocked or removed 8.3 billion ads in 2025, of which 123.9 million were related to online gambling and gaming.
Key removal categories in Google Ads
According to the report, the most common reasons for ad removals in the EU in 2025 were led by “abusing the ad network” as the largest category.
Top 5 grounds for ad removals in the EU:
- Abusing the ad network (largest category): Included policy circumvention, content masking, and cloned sites designed to evade rules.
- Trademark violations: Unauthorised use of third-party brand names to build false credibility.
- Personalisation violations: Targeting with sensitive user data without consent.
- Misrepresentation: False claims in financial, medical, and gaming offers.
- Dating and companionship ads: Content posing as social or dating services but redirecting users to betting or other adult-oriented platforms.
These insights reveal key trends in EU online ad regulations for 2025, with a focus on fraud prevention and consumer protection. The overall removal rate rose by more than a third compared with 2024.
The report states that 97 per cent of blocking decisions are taken automatically, without human review. Gemini’s improved models for context understanding reduced the number of erroneous blocks for legitimate advertisers by 80 per cent. This allowed the platform to maintain its enforcement standards while minimising disruption to compliant businesses.
The EU’s transparency strategy
Google highlights expanded advertiser verification in the EU as one of the most effective enforcement measures of 2025. All market participants, including gambling operators, must now pass identity and licensing checks. This led to a sharp drop in repeat offences and boosted voluntary certification rates among licensed operators, thereby strengthening regulatory compliance across the EU digital advertising sector.
The European Commission is already examining this transparency model as a reference point for other digital services. Industry experts have proposed establishing a pan-European registry of certified gambling advertisers to accelerate automated ad screening and prevent unlicensed operators from entering the market.
A turning point for the industry
2025 marked a turning point. This was the first time that Europe’s online advertising industry showed that artificial intelligence can do more than just filter violations. It can also help create an ethical culture for digital business. The gambling advertising sector in Europe is gradually moving away from aggressive campaign models towards responsible communication, where brand trust carries more weight than immediate traffic volume.
As the Global Ads Safety Report 2025 makes clear, the combination of Gemini and tightening regulations has enabled the EU to reach an unprecedented level of ad safety. Rising removal figures do not indicate market suppression. Instead, tighter rules are creating conditions for fair competition and keeping users within regulated environments. Gambling in Europe continues to grow, but its future will depend less on volume and more on trust, transparency and digital integrity. As the report suggests, the industry is evolving towards a simple principle: growth is acceptable, but only within the rules.
This article was first published in Russian on 23 April 2026.
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