Google emailed advertisers and publishers yesterday that they’ll start utilizing machine studying to estimate the age of signed-in customers in america to “defend younger individuals as they use Google merchandise.” This implies Google will disable advert personalization and disallow delicate inventive classes from serving for customers beneath 18.
Google introduced this earlier this 12 months however will start now deploying this modification to a “small set of customers within the U.S.” over the “subsequent few weeks.”
Google wrote extra about how this all works however the electronic mail Google despatched to advertisers reads:
As beforehand introduced, Google will start utilizing machine studying to estimate the age of signed-in customers in america. Over the subsequent few weeks, we’ll start to roll out this replace to a small set of customers within the U.S. to assist us additional defend younger individuals as they use Google merchandise. We’ll carefully monitor this earlier than we roll it out extra broadly.
For our writer advert merchandise, when our machine studying mannequin flags a Google signed-in person as seemingly beneath 18, they are going to be offered extra advert safeguards. This contains:
- Disabling advertisements personalization
- Disallowing delicate inventive classes from serving
These modifications shall be utilized to demand served by way of Google writer merchandise (Advert Supervisor, AdSense, and AdMob) when Google account data is used. There is no such thing as a motion wanted presently.
In 2021, Google did make modifications for kids and Google Advertisements personalization however now Google will use machine studying to determine the ages of its customers.
Right here is how Google does this, they stated by way of a “mixture of age estimation and, when essential, age verification.”
- Age estimation: Our age estimation mannequin makes use of machine studying to interpret a wide range of alerts already related to a person’s account, such because the sorts of data a person has looked for or the classes of movies they’ve watched on YouTube. These alerts assist us decide whether or not a person is probably going over or beneath the age of 18.
- Age verification: If we incorrectly estimate a person to be beneath 18, the person has the choice to appropriate their age, together with by importing a photograph of their authorities ID or a selfie.
I acquired this electronic mail and so did many advertisers:
right here comes the coverage violations
flags. @GoogleAds and publishersThis could get attention-grabbing #ppcchat pic.twitter.com/PmxDOuTtX6
— Drew Cannon (@Dcdigitalpro) July 30, 2025
Discussion board dialogue at X.
