Policy & compliance · also called Site exclusion, Exclusion list
Placement exclusion
A placement exclusion is an advertiser's instruction that its ads must not appear on a named website, app or category of sites.
A placement is a specific place where an ad showed, such as one partner website. An exclusion is the advertiser saying "not there again". It is the advertiser-side mirror of the blocklist an arbitrageur uses when buying native traffic.
For search arbitrage this matters because the arbitrageur's site is the placement. For years advertisers had little view of which search partner sites carried their ads. That has changed: Google's announcements page says full placement reporting for the search partner network became available in August 2025 for Search, Shopping and App campaigns, showing site-level impression data, and that from April 2025 advertisers could apply third-party verified exclusion lists from brand-safety vendors.
The effect is direct accountability. If a partner site sends clicks that never convert, the advertiser (or its agency, or a verification vendor) can find it in a report and exclude it. Enough exclusions and the site's coverage and RPC fall, whatever the feed provider thinks of it. Traffic quality is therefore the long-term defence against being excluded.
Think of it like this
It is a restaurant keeping a list of suppliers it will never order from again after a bad delivery.
Related terms
Advertiser opt-out (search partners / parked domains)
Advertiser opt-out is an advertiser's ability to stop its search ads appearing on partner sites, and in 2025 to 2026 on parked domains, outside the search engine itself.
Blocklist
A blocklist is a list of websites, apps or placements where a buyer tells an ad network never to show their ads.
Search partner network
The search partner network is the collection of non-Google or non-Microsoft sites where an advertiser's search ads can appear through syndication.
Placement
A placement is the specific website, app, section or screen position where an ad appears.
Advertiser conversion
An advertiser conversion is the valuable action, such as a sale or lead, completed on the advertiser's own site after someone clicked their ad on a search feed.
Sources: Google Ads Help: Search partner network (SPN) announcements