Ad Restore Ltd handles Google Ads suspension appeals, and the documents Google asks for are narrower than most people expect: proof of who you are, proof that the business exists, and proof that you control what you advertise. In practice that means government-issued photo identification for an authorised representative — an admin of the Google Ads account or of the payments profile paying for the ads — plus business registration records, evidence tying the company to its trading address, domain ownership and, where you advertise someone else’s services, a contract with the provider. The paperwork cannot belong to a relative or to anyone else who merely helps run the advertising, and every detail on it must match the account: legal name, address, payments profile. A document an automated reader cannot resolve is ignored; expired documents and name mismatches fail for a different reason, which Google names.

What counts as an appeal document

An appeal document is any record proving a fact Google has stopped taking on trust: that a named person stands behind the account, that a registered business does too, that the landing page address is real, and that you may advertise what the site sells. Google’s requirements rule out screenshots and photocopies. A protest that you have done nothing wrong is not evidence either — as our director puts it, you cannot go to a judge, say I’m innocent, and be believed off the bat.

What Google publishes, and what it does not

Google publishes document requirements for advertiser verification. It publishes no equivalent list for suspension appeals, but that is the closest published statement of what Google will accept from a document, and we prepare to it. The United Kingdom page states: Organizations may be required to provide 2 different types of documentation for advertiser verification: organization registration documents and a government-issued photo ID from an authorized representative. It also insists submitted details exactly match the payments profile, including the organisation name, and asks for colour images, clear and well lit, and originals rather than photocopies or screenshots (Document requirements, United Kingdom).

On why submissions fail, Google cites problems with your submitted documents, such as a mismatch between the provided organization name and the documents, expired documents, or documents missing key information (Advertiser verification). Mismatch, expiry and missing information are the three failure modes Google names.

What works, and what will not

What is needed	What works	What will not work
Identity	Current photo ID of an authorised representative — an admin of the account or payments profile	ID of a spouse, parent, child or grandparent, or of anyone who is not an admin on the account or payments profile
The business	Registration for the exact entity named on the account	A related but differently named entity, or any registration that does not match the account name
Address	The company address matching the landing page, and consistent with the account settings	An address appearing nowhere on the site, or a move the account never reflected
Domain	Registrar evidence of control over every domain in the account	Silence about a domain still attached that you no longer own
Third-party services	A signed agreement with the provider whose services you promote	An implied or historic relationship with nothing in writing
Legibility	Colour, clear, well lit, unexpired — an original image, not a photocopy or a screenshot	Black-and-white, dark or blurred images, photocopies, screenshots, anything an automated reader cannot read

That last row is no formality. In our experience an unreadable document is ignored rather than queried, and the appeal proceeds without it. A decision returned within about ten minutes reads as automated; within 24 hours it can be a human, and most appeals reach a human within five days. That is our observation, not published Google process.

The account owner problem

One failure has nothing to do with paperwork quality: the person running the account is not the person who owns it. Accounts are often set up by someone else — a relative, or a previous owner the account was bought from. Google’s document requirements page defines an authorised representative as an admin of the Google Ads account and/or the payments profile paying for the ads. We hold to something stricter: the documents have to pertain to the actual owner of the account. Not the son, not the wife, not the daughter, not the grandpa.

Where an account was bought, inherited or taken over, say so and evidence it — the relationship has to be accounted for. If you cannot get into the account at all, see suspension help without account access.

What Google cross-references

Documents are checked against the public company register, the business address, the domain registration and any privacy protection on it, and the payment method: where that card has been used across Google, whether it carries high or low trust, whether it has appeared in another account. All of it has to correlate.

What we cannot produce for you

This is a hard limit, stated before we take a case. We cannot produce your identification, your domain registration evidence, or technical proof of your infrastructure. Nor your company documentation, with one exception: UK companies sit on the public register at Companies House, and we can pull what is published there. Clients outside the UK have to supply their company records themselves, because outside the UK there is no public register we can pull them from. These documents originate with the account owner, because that ownership is the fact under examination.

We hold an agency manager account. It is not a route you lack. The same appeal form is open to every advertiser, filed from your own dashboard, and it is the one that matters: a manager account changes where a submission comes from, not what it is worth. It carries no weight with Google and no bearing on how an appeal is assessed. Ad Restore Ltd is independent of Google and has no privileged channel into it.

While you gather documents, the audit runs

Account access can take one to five days to come through, and from then we assess it in full: landing page, content, business model, keywords, what changed before the suspension, which ads are disapproved, the policy cited, and where trust broke. Do not phone Google repeatedly meanwhile: in our experience that is a different case support team from the one deciding your appeal, so repeated calls do not move it — our observation, not published process. We stay with the account after reinstatement as well; that support runs for 14 days and is conditional on the invoice being settled — see 14 days of post-reinstatement support.

If the first appeal is pushed back

A denial does not end the case, and what follows is taken case by case. If we have filed an appeal and it has been pushed back, we reassess what worked and what did not and go from there: what further documentation may now be required — payslips, contracts, agreements — and what adjustments the site itself needs, so that when the page is crawled and the documentation is scanned, there is coherence between the two. That is the point of a second submission. Not the first one repeated with more insistence, but the gap the first one exposed, closed. We tend to resolve on the first or second appeal; it is rarely, if ever, the third. Collect more than the minimum at the outset for exactly that reason — a second attempt moves faster when the material is already to hand.

When documents will not save the account

Some cases cannot be won with paperwork, and we say so at consultation rather than run them. Since Ad Restore Ltd began trading in October 2024, roughly 20 to 30 per cent of enquiries have been declined at the consultation stage. The recurring reasons:

No access to a domain the account advertises. The one true impossibility: if the account moved domains and you cannot prove you own the old one still attached, there is no case.
Too many domains on one account. Two is already difficult, above three the investigation outruns the result, and at five or more we decline.
Advertising a business that is not yours, with no agreement. Documents about your own company do not answer that.
Financial services keywords advertised without the verification Google requires before financial services can be advertised. Until that verification is obtained, no document set makes the account compliant.
Unpaid Google billing. Any outstanding balance owed to Google should be settled before the appeal is filed, not argued about. No document replaces paying the bill.
No access to the technical side of your own website, so nothing can be made to correlate.
A tracking URL Google has classed as phishing.
Gambling, pornography and sexual content, which we do not take.

Where recovery is genuinely not possible, resolve the suspension rather than route around it: it is recorded against your name whether the system picks it up straight away or later. Circumventing Google’s systems is one of the things that makes a case harder, and Google’s policy on it is unambiguous — accounts are suspended upon detection and without prior warning, with no further advertising permitted.

Everything else we take on. Hard cases — multiple suspensions, accounts to consolidate, a wall of disapproved ads — get honest expectations rather than a refusal; you can see how we handle fees first. Read that page for what the arrangement is and is not: no fix, no fee is a fee arrangement, not an outcome guarantee. Reinstatement is Google’s decision and nobody can promise it.

Talk it through before you send anything

Bring what you already have — identification, company records, anything relating to the domain — and we will tell you what is missing and whether the case is worth running before you spend a day scanning. Book a consultation with Ad Restore Ltd.

What documents does Google want for a suspension appeal?