Policy & compliance · also called Feed termination, Feed loss, Account termination
Feed suspension (account termination)
A feed suspension is when the search feed owner or feed provider stops serving ads to a publisher, pausing or permanently ending its ability to earn from that feed.
For a search arbitrage business the search feed is the only product on the shelf. If it is suspended, revenue stops the same day while ad spend already committed on traffic sources still has to be paid.
Suspension can happen at two levels. A feed provider can cut off a single partner, channel or domain. Or the search engine can act against the provider's own account, which hits every partner beneath it. Google's AdSense help says that for invalid traffic it may limit ad serving, disable it, or suspend or close the account, and that publishers are responsible for their traffic even when a third party caused the problem. Unpaid earnings linked to invalid activity can be withheld and returned to advertisers.
Common triggers are invalid traffic, repeated policy violations, undeclared traffic sources and deceptive creatives. Because the damage is immediate, experienced operators spread risk across more than one feed and keep cash reserves: see platform risk and concentration risk. This is different from an account ban, which is the buying-side equivalent on a traffic source.
Think of it like this
It is like a wholesaler refusing to supply a shop. The shop still has rent and staff to pay, but nothing to sell.
Related terms
Policy violation
A policy violation is any breach of the rules set by a search feed or traffic source, from a misleading creative to non-compliant traffic or a wrongly declared parameter.
Account ban
An account ban is an ad platform's decision to disable an advertiser's account, stopping all its ads, usually for breaking or appearing to break advertising policies.
Platform risk
Platform risk is the chance that a company you depend on, such as Google, Microsoft or Meta, changes its rules, prices or products in a way that damages your business.
Clawback (revenue deduction)
A clawback is revenue a feed removes from a publisher's earnings after the fact, usually because clicks were judged invalid and the advertiser was refunded.
Feed provider
A feed provider is a company that holds a search ad contract with Google, Microsoft or Yahoo and lets smaller publishers use it in return for a share of revenue.
Concentration risk
Concentration risk is the danger of depending too heavily on one feed, one traffic source, one keyword group or one account, so a single failure hurts the whole business.
Sources: Google AdSense Help: Definition of invalid traffic, Google AdSense Help: Policy violations in scope for Restricted Access Features (RAFs)