What’s changing?
As announced last year, Google will stop serving political advertising in the European Union (EU) ahead of new regulation in October 2025. Starting September 8, 2025, the Display & Video 360 API and Structured Data Files (SDFs) will roll out enforcements related to this change. If you use either of these products to create or manage line items, you may need to update your application to handle these enforcements before September 8, 2025 to avoid an interruption of service.
Background
Starting September 8, 2025, Display & Video 360 will require self-declaration for EU political ads. You must declare whether a line item will serve EU political ads when creating it.
You can also make this declaration for the advertiser as a whole. This declaration will state whether any line items under the advertiser will serve EU political ads. Make the declaration at the advertiser level using the Display & Video 360 API or under the advertiser Basic details settings in the Display & Video 360 UI once it launches after September 8. If you declare that your advertiser won’t serve EU political ads, new line items under that advertiser will use that declaration if another isn’t provided, avoiding an interruption of service.
Display & Video 360 API and Structured Data Files have added support for declaring whether a line item serves EU political ads. Similar support for self-declaration will launch in the Display & Video 360 UI starting September 8, 2025.
Display & Video 360 API
In the Display & Video 360 API, the field containsEuPoliticalAds has been added to the following API objects in v3 and v4 to surface self-declaration at different resource levels:
LineItem Advertiser
The possible settable values for the field are shown in the table below, with a meaning relevant to the resource to which it is assigned.
Value Meaning
CONTAINS_EU_POLITICAL_ADVERTISING
The resource will be used to serve EU political ads.
DOES_NOT_CONTAIN_EU_POLITICAL_ADVERTISING
The resource will not be used to serve EU political ads.
Starting September 8, 2025 , Display & Video 360 API will start requiring that the containsEuPoliticalAds field is set for new line item resources or for existing line item resources when updating geography targeting of existing line items.
What do I need to do?
Every new line item created will need a valid declaration using the field containsEuPoliticalAds.
Set the containsEuPoliticalAds Advertiser advertisers.patch Basic details settings in the Display & Video 360 UI once it is available. If you set the containsEuPoliticalAds DOES_NOT_CONTAIN_EU_POLITICAL_ADVERTISING for the parent advertiser, new line items will use that value unless another value is set at creation, and the field will be backfilled for existing line items within a day. This field can then be updated using either the UI, API, or Structured Data Files.
If your advertiser is not serving EU political ads, declaring at the advertiser level will be a sufficient action to avoid errors. If you can’t declare at the advertiser level or have declared that EU political ads may be served under your advertiser, you must update your use of the following API methods:
Structured Data Files
In Structured Data Files, we have launched v9 , which adds the column Contains EU Political Ads to the line item file. This allows for the retrieval and setting of EU political ads declaration at the line item level. This column uses the values YES and NO to represent the line item declaration.
With this launch, we are also deprecating SDF v7.1, v8, and v8.1 and recommend that you migrate to v9 your earliest convenience. We will support these versions until we sunset them in March 2026.
Starting September 8, 2025 , Display & Video 360 will start requiring you to use v9 to upload Structured Data Files and set the Contains EU Political Ads column to YES or NO for new SDF line item entries. If your advertiser has declared that it will not serve EU political ads, you can continue to use previous versions to upload SDFs.
What do I need to do?
Every new line item created will need a valid declaration using the column Contains EU Political Ads.
Set the containsEuPoliticalAds field in the advertiser using the Display & Video 360 API advertisers.patch Basic details settings in the Display & Video 360 UI once it is available. If you declare that the advertiser will not serve EU political ads, new line items will use the NO value for the Contains EU Political Ads column unless another value is set at creation, and the field will be backfilled for existing line items within a day. This enables you to use v7, v7.1, v8, or v8.1 for SDF upload. After line item creation, this field can be updated using the UI, API, or Structured Data Files.
If you can’t declare at the advertiser level or have declared that EU political ads may be served under your advertiser, do the following before September 8, 2025 :
Migrate to using SDF v9. See our migration guide for instructions.
Set the Contains EU Political Ads column to YES or NO in line item entries on SDF upload when:
Creating new line items.
Updating any of the following columns of the existing line item:
Geography Targeting - IncludeGeography Targeting - ExcludeGeography Regional Location List Targeting - IncludeGeography Regional Location List Targeting - ExcludeProximity TargetingProximity Location List Targeting
Creating new ad groups with set Geography Targeting columns under the existing line item.
Updating the Geography Targeting columns of ad groups under the existing line item.
Also, if you use Structured Data Files at all, make sure to migrate to v9 before all previous versions are sunset in March 2026.
How do I get help?
Reach out to the Display & Video 360 API support channels if you have more questions about this change.
