AdSense Still Won't Approve Us… Rejected a 4th and 5th Time
We've expanded the game, added a lot more content to the site, redesigned the whole thing, and worked on driving traffic from social media.
I was sure this time we'd pass — then today, another rejection arrived.
We've already been approved for AdSense H5 game ads, so all that should be left is getting the target URL approved for standard AdSense. And yet…
The message Google sends is the same every time.
Policy violation found
Please make sure your site complies with the AdSense Program Policies. Once you've fixed the issues, you can request a review of your site.
Thin content
Maintaining a healthy and trustworthy advertising ecosystem requires publishers to meet clear quality and operational standards. To be eligible for ads, your site must offer unique value, establish a consistent presence on the web, and attract genuine user interest at a level that can sustain a commercial advertising partnership.
Before resubmitting your site, please confirm that you:
- Provide reliable, high-quality information, tools, or services.
- Actively curate and maintain your site structure.
- Attract and retain genuine user interest.
For more information, please see:
- Google AdSense Content and User Experience policies
- Google's spam policies for thin content
- Google's web search spam policies
Every time, it's a mystery in boilerplate form — the kind of riddle that would give even a detective pause.
It's always the same form letter, the same set of links. I read them again, try to guess the cause, spend time improving the site, and resubmit.
But when all you get is the same message and the same links, there's a limit to how much you can diagnose.
My personal blog passed AdSense review. I've submitted AdSense applications for several business web services over the years. I had never been rejected before — not once.
Space☆Tower, the physics-based stacking game I have out now, is a concept I first came up with seven years ago. I originally built it myself in Unity, then remade it this time with AI, going through countless rounds of trial and error over about eight months. I'm genuinely proud of it.
I've heard of people getting rejected nineteen times before finally passing on the twentieth. Feeling pretty beaten down right now, but today I'll start investigating the cause with Claude again and think about what else we can try.
This has turned into mostly venting — so let me note one thing I noticed.
AI seems to have a tendency to repeat the same things and expect different results.
When I told Claude we'd been rejected again, it looked like it was about to recommend the same steps it had before — so I asked it to completely change its angle and approach the investigation differently.
And then it said:
"There's something called the AdSense Help Community — let's try posting a question there."
That was a suggestion it hadn't made before.
I'm going to give that a try this time too.
Alright, time to get back at it. ＞＜；；
Series: "I wish I'd known this from the start"
- Start with GitHub, whatever else you do
- Where I got stuck connecting GitHub
- Don't trust the AI's memory. Keep everything in GitHub
- Working with Xserver — FTP, .htaccess, and deploys that fail
- Always start from the facts — write the rules, then keep fixing them
- The parts that were genuinely hard, and what I did about them
- AdSense keeps rejecting my site
- Just write @claude in an Issue, and Claude Code gets to work
- Can you really hand game dev off to AI?
- Goodbye, ChatGPT — Banned Twice, Moved to Claude
- How I Get Claude to Make Pictures
- AdSense Still Won't Approve Us… Rejected a 4th and 5th Time (this article)