What are Google's Restricted Access Features (RAF) for RSOC?
Restricted Access Features are RSOC capabilities that Google, from August 2025, reserves for publishers in good standing. Reported restrictions for everyone else include a maximum of five suggested terms per block, one related search block per page, limited ad styling and fewer reporting channels. Google said it lifts restrictions case by case for publishers that maintain quality.
The change was reported by trade press and vendors, with 25 August 2025 given as the start date. It ties optimisation tools to behaviour. Fewer reporting channels means coarser data, which makes it harder to find which source or keyword is profitable. Fewer terms and blocks mean fewer chances for a click.
For a compliant publisher the practical response is to earn the features back: keep invalid traffic low, pass referrerAdCreative correctly, avoid policy violations and keep content genuinely useful. Team Internet referred to the new policies when describing the challenges of its move to RSOC. Google's help page describes a strike system: any ten in-scope policy violations, or a single egregious one, count as a strike, and a third strike removes the features for good. Some early trade-press reports gave a lower count, so rely on Google's own page.