How to exclude placements in Performance Max, and where the limits are

The short answer: account level, not campaign level

How to exclude placements in Performance Max: you do it at the account level, not inside the campaign. Open Google Ads, go to Tools, then Content suitability, and add the domains, apps, YouTube channels and videos you never want to appear next to. Everything you add there applies across the whole account, Performance Max included. There is no placements tab inside a PMax campaign, and there never has been one.

That one fact explains most of the frustration. Advertisers go looking for the Display-style placement controls they are used to, find nothing in the campaign, and decide PMax has no brand safety settings at all. It has several. They just live somewhere else, they are blunter than you would like, and they are all-or-nothing across the account.

So the honest version of this post is: here is what you can control, here is what you cannot, and here is how to tell whether it is worth your afternoon.

Where Performance Max ads actually show

Before you exclude anything, it helps to know what you are excluding from. One PMax campaign buys across every Google surface at once, which Google documents plainly enough:

• Search. Text ads on Google results, including queries no keyword list of yours describes.
• Shopping. Product listings pulled straight from your Merchant Center feed.
• YouTube. In-stream, in-feed and Shorts inventory, on whichever channels the system picks.
• Display. The Google Display Network: an enormous pool of websites and mobile apps.
• Discover. The scrolling feed inside the Google app.
• Gmail. The promotions tab.
• Maps. Local inventory for businesses with locations attached.

Five of those seven carry no third-party content at all: Search, Shopping, Discover, Gmail and Maps are Google’s own real estate, and nobody has ever filed a complaint because their ad appeared above a search result. The brand safety worry lives almost entirely in the other two, Display and YouTube, where the inventory belongs to somebody else: the app nobody has heard of, the video nobody would sponsor, and the parked domain that exists purely to catch typos.

If you want the broader picture of how the campaign type decides any of this, we pulled it apart in our guide to Performance Max campaigns.

How to add account-level placement exclusions

1. 1Open Tools, then Content suitability. Google has a habit of rearranging the furniture, so if it is not there, type "content suitability" into the search bar at the top of the account and it will take you straight in.
2. 2Go to the excluded placements list and paste in what you want gone. It accepts website domains, mobile apps, YouTube channels and individual YouTube videos. You can also build reusable placement exclusion lists under the shared library and apply them account-wide.
3. 3Add adsenseformobileapps.com if you do not want to appear inside mobile apps at all. It is a single entry that removes a whole category of inventory most business-to-business advertisers never meant to buy in the first place.
4. 4Exclude the obvious ones before launch, not after. Competitor properties you would rather not fund, content categories that clash with your brand, and any channel or app you already know is not your market.
5. 5Remember the blast radius. These exclusions are account-wide. Blocking a domain here removes it from every campaign in the account, not just the PMax one.

While you are in there, you will also find account-level negative keywords. Those are a different control solving a different problem: they stop your ads matching certain searches, not certain websites. If your actual complaint is "PMax keeps showing on the wrong terms", that is the keyword side of the house, and we covered how it works in does Performance Max use keywords.

Brand exclusions are a third thing again. They are campaign-level, they work off brand names, and they exist to stop PMax hoovering up traffic that was searching for you (or a competitor) anyway. Useful, but they will not keep you off a website.

Content suitability, inventory type and excluded content

Placement exclusions are the scalpel. Content suitability is the blanket, and for most advertisers the blanket does more of the work, because nobody can manually list every bad placement on the internet.

• Inventory type. Expanded, Standard or Limited. Standard is the default and screens out the obviously unsuitable. Limited is stricter and will visibly cut your reach. Expanded opens things up, and is rarely the right call for a brand with a reputation to protect.
• Excluded content types. Embedded YouTube videos, live streaming video, games and parked domains. Parked domains is the one nearly everyone should tick.
• Digital content labels. Google rates inventory from general audiences through to mature. Excluding the higher labels, and content not yet labeled, removes a large slice of the stuff that generates the awkward screenshots.
• Sensitive content categories. Tragedy and conflict, sensitive social issues, profanity and rough language, sexually suggestive content, and similar. Worth a read even if you exclude none of them.

On the YouTube side, it is worth understanding what Google already screens out before you get a say. The advertiser-friendly content guidelines set the baseline for which videos can carry ads at all, which is why the YouTube half of your placement report is usually tamer than advertisers expect.

Performance Max reads these settings from the account. You cannot run one conservative PMax campaign and one wide-open prospecting campaign with different suitability rules. If your business genuinely needs both, that is a second Google Ads account, not a second campaign.

The placement report, and what it will not tell you

You can see where your ads appeared. Go to Reports, open the predefined reports, and find the Performance Max placements report. It lists the websites, apps, YouTube channels and videos your ads showed on.

Now the disappointing part: it reports impressions and nothing else. No cost, no clicks, no conversions. You can see that your ad appeared on a channel four hundred times. You cannot see what those impressions cost you, whether anyone clicked, or whether a single dollar came back. The Google Ads API documentation is equally clear about how much of PMax is reported in aggregate rather than by surface.

Impressions with no cost attached are a brand safety check, not performance data. Useful for deciding what to exclude. Useless for deciding what to fund.

So use it for the job it can do. Once a month, sort by impressions, read the top fifty rows, and add anything that makes you wince to the account exclusion list. Then stop. The long tail runs to thousands of placements, and nobody has ever excluded their way to a spotless network.

When placement exclusions are not your problem

Here is the part that might save you the afternoon. For plenty of Australian businesses, placements are not what is wrong with the campaign, and grinding through that report is procrastination with a spreadsheet attached.

• Your PMax is hitting target. If cost per acquisition is where you want it, leave the placements alone. Cutting inventory that is converting because the domain looks unimpressive is a way to pay more for the same result.
• Your conversion tracking is shaky. Fix measurement first. Excluding placements on the strength of numbers you do not trust is not optimization, it is redecorating.
• You are spending a few hundred dollars a month. At that level the spend is spread so thin across surfaces that exclusions will not move the outcome. Put the hour into the landing page or the offer instead.
• Your real issue is search terms. Wrong queries are a negative keyword and brand exclusion problem. No amount of placement blocking will touch it.

The businesses that genuinely need tight placement control usually have a specific reason: a regulated industry, a government-adjacent brand, a board that would ask pointed questions if the logo turned up beside the wrong video. If that is you, set the exclusions before launch and check the report monthly. If it is not you, a sensible default covers it: standard inventory, parked domains excluded, mobile apps excluded if you sell to businesses, and then get on with your day.

And if you are still weighing up whether to run the campaign type at all, that is a separate decision, and we argued both sides in is Performance Max worth it. Once it is running, brand safety settings and a monthly placement review are a standard part of how we handle Google Ads management.

Frequently asked questions