Tech giant Google blocked or removed 483.7 million policy-violating advertisements and suspended 1.7 million advertiser accounts in India in 2025 with the help of its AI platform Gemini.

The sharp rise in enforcement also reflects the rapid expansion of India’s online advertising ecosystem, driven by growing internet penetration, e-commerce adoption and a surge in small businesses coming online. However, this growth has been accompanied by an increase in fraudulent schemes, misleading financial promotions and impersonation-based scams, prompting platforms to deploy more advanced detection tools.

Globally, Google blocked or removed over 8.3 billion bad ads and suspended 24.9 million advertiser accounts last year, according to Google's '2025 Ads Safety Report' released on Thursday.

The company stated that the integration of its Gemini artificial intelligence models has dramatically improved its ability to detect and stop bad actors in real-time, especially as scammers increasingly use generative AI to create deceptive ads at scale.

Of the 8.3 billion ads removed globally, Google said it stopped over 99 per cent before they were ever seen by users.

"Our safety teams work around the clock to stop bad actors that use increasingly sophisticated, malicious ads," Keerat Sharma, VP & General Manager, Ads Privacy and Safety at Google, said in a blog post.

"Our models analyse hundreds of billions of signals — including account age, behavioural cues and campaign patterns — to stop threats before they reach people. Unlike earlier keyword-based systems, our latest models better understand intent, helping us spot malicious content and preemptively block it, even when it’s designed to evade detection," Sharma said.

In India, the top five policy violations that led to the removal of advertisements were related to trademarks, financial services, copyright, personalisation violations, and abusing the ad network.

Gemini helped process user reports more efficiently, Google said, enabling action on four times as many user reports in 2025 compared to the previous year.

The latest figures also come amid increasing regulatory scrutiny of digital platforms in India, with authorities emphasising stricter compliance on misleading advertisements and consumer protection.

Industry experts note that as AI lowers the barrier for creating high-quality deceptive content, tech platforms will need to continuously upgrade their safeguards, making AI-led moderation a critical component of the digital advertising ecosystem going forward. (with inputs from PTI)