Tag a site or ad request for child-directed treatment

Changes to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) went into effect on 1 July 2013. These changes may affect your use of Google products. COPPA applies to websites and services directed to children in the United States who are under the age of 13 and general audience sites or services with users known to be under the age of 13 in the United States. Other countries may define the age of a child differently in their laws or have different rules applicable to underage users. If you use Google products to serve ads in other countries, please be aware of those requirements. Learn more about the age requirements on Google Accounts.

Tag a site

If you use Google’s advertising services and you’d like us to treat your site or portions of your site as directed to children, then you can use the following method to notify us:

• Search console

If you tag your site for treatment as child-directed, then we will take steps to disable interest-based advertising and remarketing ads for that content. It may take some time for this designation to take effect.

Tag an ad request from a site or app

To give you finer control over how your content is treated, you can tag individual ad requests for treatment as child-directed. If you tag your ad request for treatment as child-directed, then we will disable interest-based advertising and remarketing ads for that ad request. Note that including the tag in an ad request will take precedence over any applicable site-level settings.

For example, let’s say that you run a TV review site and you know that the instant user on the site is a child. Rather than tagging your entire site as child-directed, you can just set the tag for child-directed treatment for ad requests shown to this child user to prevent interest-based advertising and remarketing ads from showing in that impression.

The guidelines below describe how to mark your ad requests as child-directed for sites:

For guidance about tagging an ad request from an app, see the 'child-directed setting' section of the Google Mobile Ads SDK Developers site for Android and iOS.

As the content owner in control of your site or app, you generally control how your content is treated with respect to COPPA. However, even without notice from you, in some cases Google may begin to treat your site or app as child-directed pursuant to our own obligations under COPPA. In these cases, we'll attempt to notify you and you may use Search Console, the ad request tagging feature for sites or the ad request tagging feature for apps to specify a particular treatment.