Chrome is Going to Start Blocking Bad Ads on February 15

After announcing in June that Google planned to start blocking ads in Chrome at some point in early 2018, ads that violate the Better Ads Standards, Google has updated us today with an official date. Come February 15, if your website has been flagged with a “failing” status in Google’s Ad Experience Report for more than 30 days, they’ll remove all ads from it.

As Google explained in June, bad ads (full-page interstitials, ads with unexpected sound, and flashing ads) have had a negative impact on almost everyone’s experience on the web. Because of poorly designed or malicious ads, people are installing ad blockers at an increasing rate and making it harder and harder for free content to exist. Google even went as far as to say that ad blocker use because of bad ads is threatening the sustainability of the web ecosystem.

So again, on February 15, if your website is failing with ad standards, it won’t show ads any longer in Chrome on both desktop and mobile. If you receive a failing score or want to check your score, you can do so in Google’s Webmaster Tools and the Ad Experience Report. Google can also help you in their Ad Experience Report Help Forum.

For those of you who don’t own a website, well, this is good news for you. As long as you use Chrome, Google will make sure you see fewer and fewer obnoxious ads, which will hopefully mean less reliance on an ad blocker to help support the content providers you read the most.

// Google Developers