Preparing a Game Site for Google AdSense: Our Complete Checklist
📅 June 15, 2026✍️ Sam Chen🏷️ Industry⏱️ 5 min read
Getting approved by Google AdSense is notoriously difficult for game sites. We spent months preparing Gerk Games specifically for AdSense review. Here's the exact checklist we used, based on publicly available guidelines and community experience.
Content Requirements
AdSense requires: minimum 20-30 pages of substantial original content, clear site navigation, privacy policy with AdSense Cookie disclosure, about page with real team info, contact page with working email, terms of service. We met all of these before submitting.
The critical factor that most game sites miss: each game page needs more than just a game iframe. Our game pages include 300-500 words of original description, controls documentation, and strategy tips. This gives AdSense enough context to serve relevant ads and enough content to index properly.
Technical Requirements That Matter
Beyond content quality, AdSense has specific technical requirements. The site must have a valid privacy policy that explicitly mentions Google's use of cookies and personalized advertising. This is non-negotiable and missing it guarantees rejection. The site must also have an SSL certificate serving HTTPS. Cloudflare provides this automatically for proxied domains.
The about page needs real people with real credentials. A generic "we love games" page will not pass review. Our about page includes Sam Chen (6 years in digital publishing) and Tom Reeves (10 years in software engineering) with specific backgrounds. Contact page needs a working email address and preferably a physical address or phone number. Terms of service must include copyright ownership and user conduct guidelines.
The most overlooked requirement is navigation structure. Every page should be reachable from the homepage within 3 clicks. Our site structure makes this easy: games go to games/index, articles go to blog/index, and all core pages are linked in the header and footer. AdSense reviewers will audit this structure. If any page is orphaned (no links pointing to it), the site may be rejected for poor user experience.
One final consideration: page load speed. Google has explicitly stated that page speed is a ranking factor, and AdSense reviewers have access to PageSpeed data. Our games average under 10KB per file. The wrapper pages add another 3-5KB of CSS and HTML. Total page weight for a game page is under 20KB — well within the recommended threshold of 100KB for fast mobile loading. We also optimized image assets to SVG (under 1KB) instead of PNG or JPEG formats. Every kilobyte saved improves both AdSense approval odds and user experience.
Why Game Sites Get Rejected
The most common reason a game site fails AdSense review is "low value content," and it is usually a fair judgment rather than a mistake. A crawler cannot play a game; it can only read text. A site that is nothing but embedded game frames with a few words of description looks, to an automated reviewer, like a page with almost no content. The entire preparation strategy for a game site therefore comes down to giving the crawler something substantial to read on every important page — real descriptions, real guides, real editorial — so the site reads as a content site that happens to have games, not a content-free game wrapper.
The Required Pages Are Non-Negotiable
Before applying, a site needs a genuine privacy policy that explicitly addresses advertising cookies and third-party data, a real about page that establishes who runs the site, a working contact method, and clear terms. These are not formalities — their absence is a direct rejection trigger. The privacy policy in particular must name the advertising relationship and explain cookie use, because AdSense itself sets cookies and the policy has to disclose that. A site missing any of these pages is not ready regardless of how good its content is.
Originality and Honesty in Structured Data
Two things will sink an otherwise-ready site: content that is not original, and structured data that lies. Padding pages with copied or auto-generated filler is detectable and fatal. Equally fatal is fake review or rating markup — declaring star ratings and review counts that do not correspond to real user reviews. Reviewers check for this, and inventing ratings in schema markup is treated as deception. The honest path is the only durable one: original content, truthful markup, and complete policy pages.