Suspended for restricted or prohibited products

This page is written differently from the others, because the honest answer is different. For most of the suspension reasons we cover, the cause is a configuration fault and the work is to find it. For this one, the cause is frequently a decision about what you sell, and no amount of measurement changes it.

We would rather say that here than after you have paid.

What the policy actually requires

Google separates two things that merchants tend to blur together:

• Prohibited products may not be advertised at all. No configuration, no wording, no disclaimer makes them eligible.
• Restricted products may be advertised under conditions — certification, a particular market, an approval process, a limit on how they are described.

Both live under the same notice, and the first thing to establish is which one you are in. If the answer is prohibited, the fix is a business decision about your assortment. If the answer is restricted, the fix may be a matter of certification, targeting, or how the products are described — and the last of those is measurable.

What usually lies behind it

The product genuinely falls in a restricted category

The common case, and the one where a technical audit does not help. Supplements, health claims, medical devices, alcohol, weapons and their accessories, political content, financial products — each with its own rules, several of which vary by market.

A substance on a named list appears in the catalogue

This part is mechanical. Google publishes lists of restricted substances, and a lookup against a named list is a fact, not an interpretation. A catalogue can carry one without anyone realising, particularly where products are imported with supplier descriptions.

High Claims check

A substance on a published restricted list appears in the catalogue

This is a lookup against a named list rather than a judgement about the product. It tells you where to look; it does not tell you that you are in breach.

Evidence

match

a listed substance in a product description

source

a published list, quoted

verdict

none — this is a flag, not a finding of breach

Illustrative — constructed to show the shape of the fault. The numbers are not from a measured run.

Medical or therapeutic language in names and categories

The description makes a claim the product category is not allowed to make. “Supports immune function” and “treats infection” are not the same sentence to a reviewer, and a translation plugin can move a description from the first to the second without anyone editing anything.

This is a flag, not a legal judgement, and our reporting says so in as many words. It is also never raised to Critical, on purpose: a tool that escalates its own guesses is a tool that teaches you to ignore it.

A market you did not intend to sell into

A product that is restricted in one country and ordinary in another, offered in a feed that targets both. The assortment is fine; the targeting is not.

Supplier text imported unchanged

Where a catalogue is built from supplier feeds, the claims come with it. The merchant has never read the sentence that caused the problem.

What the free Quick Scan can see of this

Being precise here matters more than on any other page, because the gap between what we can measure and what caused your suspension is widest.

Measurable from outside, without any access:

• Whether a substance on a published restricted list appears anywhere in your catalogue, as a lookup against a named list with the match quoted.
• Medical or therapeutic language in product and category names, flagged for you to judge.
• Machine-translation artefacts that have turned a permitted description into a stronger claim than the original made.
• Which markets your feed and your pages declare they are for.

Not measurable from outside, by anyone:

• Whether Google considers your product prohibited or restricted. That is their classification, not a property of your page.
• Whether you hold, or could hold, the certification a restricted category requires.
• What a reviewer objected to specifically. This notice is frequently issued against a category rather than against a page.
• Anything in your account history, which weighs heavily on this reason in particular.

Whether we are the right instrument for you

We decline this case more often than any other, and the triage is deliberately on our sales pages rather than buried in a conversation later:

• If the issue is that the product may not be advertised at all, the fix is an assortment decision. A technical audit does not help you, and we will say so.
• If the issue is a rights or certification question, that is between you and a rights holder or a regulator.
• If the issue is how the products are described — claims, translated claims, a listed substance nobody noticed — that part is measurable, and it is the part where our tooling earns anything.

The Quick Scan is free and is how we work out which of those you are in. In each of the first two cases we will tell you what we think is going on and what kind of help would actually be useful, and we will not invoice you for the scan.

What we do, when we take it

We run the same seven checks, and the claims check runs last on purpose — because it is the one place a tool is most tempted to overreach. Substance matches are reported as lookups against a named list, with the list named. Risk words are reported as flags for you to judge, never as verdicts, and neither can be raised to Critical no matter how many of them there are.

Everything else in the report is the ordinary work: reachability, policy pages, identity, locale and the feed. On a shop suspended for this reason, those often turn out to carry faults of their own — which is worth knowing, and is still not the same thing as fixing the reason on the notice.