Policy & compliance · also called Sensitive vertical, Restricted category
Restricted vertical
A restricted vertical is a topic area, such as gambling, adult content, drugs or certain financial and health offers, where ads are limited, need permission or are banned.
A vertical is a topic category like insurance, travel or legal services. Some verticals carry more risk of harm or deception, so platforms fence them off. On the feed side, Google's help pages say related-search terms that are explicit, adult or sensitive, including sexual content, violence, gambling and substance abuse, are filtered out, and content covered by the Google Publisher Restrictions may receive no ads at all. On the buying side, Meta, TikTok and native networks have their own lists, and some categories (credit, housing, employment, health claims, politics) carry extra targeting or wording limits.
The tension for arbitrageurs is that several high-RPC verticals sit close to the line: debt relief, injury claims, medical treatments, government benefits. They pay well because advertisers value the leads, and they attract misleading creatives for the same reason.
The compliant route is to check both rule books before testing a vertical, use neutral informational angles, and accept that some topics are simply not available.
An example
"Compare car insurance quotes" is an ordinary vertical. "Online casino bonus" is restricted: the term would be filtered from an RSOC unit and the ad would need special permission on most traffic sources.
Related terms
Vertical
A vertical is a subject area or industry, such as insurance, travel or home improvement, that a set of ads and keywords belongs to.
RSOC policies
RSOC policies are Google's rules for the related-search unit on content pages: real standalone content, honest search terms, honest upstream ads and a fully declared ad creative.
Ad review (ad approval)
Ad review is the check an advertising platform runs on each ad and its landing page before, and sometimes after, allowing it to be shown.
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.
Misleading ad
A misleading ad promises or implies something the landing page does not deliver, tricking people into a click they would not otherwise have made.
Sources: Google AdSense Help: Related search for your content pages, Google AdSense Help: AdSense for Search Product-Integrated Feature policies