Additional changes for supporting European Union Political Ads Regulation in Google Ads API and Google Ads scripts

What’s changing?

In 2025, Google rolled out changes to support the EU Political Ads Regulation in the Google Ads API and Google Ads scripts. On April 1, 2026, we will change account-level API restrictions. If you use either of these products to create or manage campaigns, you may need to update your application before April 1, 2026 to handle these enforcements.

API validation and enforcement changes

On April 1, 2026, Google Ads API and Google Ads scripts will implement the following changes in versions v20, v21, v22 and v23 of the API.

• If a Google Ads account has one or more undeclared campaigns, all mutate calls related to campaign management will fail with a MutateError.EU_POLITICAL_ADVERTISING_DECLARATION_REQUIRED error.
• You can determine if a campaign is undeclared by examining the Campaign’s missing_eu_political_advertising_declaration field.
• All other calls – such as reporting, account management or keyword planner – will continue to work unaffected. See the full list of methods.
• To declare currently undeclared campaigns, retrieve the list of eligible campaigns, and set their contains_eu_political_advertising declaration using the CampaignService.MutateCampaigns method, GoogleAdsService.Mutate method, or using the BatchJobService. These methods won’t fail with a MutateError.EU_POLITICAL_ADVERTISING_DECLARATION_REQUIRED error as long as you only update the campaign's contains_eu_political_advertising field. You can retrieve the list of undeclared campaigns by running the following GAQL query using either the Search or SearchStream methods of the GoogleAdsService.

    select campaign.id
      from
        campaign
      where 
        campaign.missing_eu_political_advertising_declaration = true

How will this affect my campaign serving?

Any campaign that has declared EU political ads by setting contains_eu_political_advertising to true will stop serving ads in the EU. Refer to the Help Center to learn more.

What do I need to do?

If your application uses either the Google Ads API or Google Ads scripts to create or manage campaigns, make sure to update your application to handle these enforcements before April 1, 2026.

How do I get help?

Reach out to the Google Ads API support or Google Ads scripts support channels if you have more questions about this change.

 - Anash P. Oommen, Google Ads API Team