Different Countries, Different Interfaces… Literally
If you’ve ever applied for AdSense from multiple countries (on purpose, or because your VPN got confused), you’ll notice something real weird, real fast: the UI isn’t always the same. I ran three applications back to back — one from a client based in the UAE, another from India, and one for a nonprofit in New Zealand — and the steps, fields, and help articles linked from the dashboard were subtly different. Like, not language-different. Structural-different. One had a GST field, the other didn’t ask for tax info until verification, and New Zealand’s version just zipped right past any tax stuff on signup.
Also — and this part is funny until it isn’t — that AdSense home screen that says “We’re reviewing your site, this usually takes a few days”? That message stuck around for weeks in one case, even though the site was already approved and ads were showing. Turned out the UI element just didn’t refresh server-side after approval… but only on the Middle East region accounts. Cool, thanks.
Payments Setup: Bank Routing Isn’t Just Routing
Get ready to lose your mind over banking formats. AdSense payments behave like moon logic outside the US or EU — especially when it comes to bank account verification. In Malaysia, I had a case where CIMB didn’t accept the 9-digit US-based routing number format, even though the help center says it supports “international SWIFT-compatible banks.”
The trick (which I found in an ancient support thread buried three clicks deep in the Community tab): you need to enter the SWIFT code and pad your bank account number to 10 digits with zeros… even if your bank tells you not to. Ultra-specific. No docs. Worked instantly.
“We noticed a problem with your payment method” — but didn’t explain which part. Classic.
Verification Docs That Actually Get You Flagged
So here’s a fun spiral I went down: submitted a perfectly valid utility bill for address verification for a South African client. Clear name, clear address, legit Telkom statement. Rejected twice. Switched to a leased internet invoice — also rejected. You know what finally worked?
A damn government-issued vehicle tax document. Why? No idea. My hunch is the OCR logic Amazon Mechanical-Turk-style reviewers use doesn’t like scanned images over 2MB or with logos on the left side. You can’t prove that’s why, but… go check your own scans.
Things that have gotten verified:
Bank statement PDF, page 2 only (page 1 spoofed the wrong address)
Lease agreement with watermarks
A mobile phone bill in grayscale — but the color version got rejected
A notarized address affidavit, only when uploaded as a JPEG
This whole behavior isn’t explained anywhere. Feels like some silent ML scoring based on “image doc type entropy” or something equally cursed.
Tax Info Collection Varies in Nonsense Levels
Filing tax info from India? Expect to fill out the full US W-8BEN even though Google confirms you’re exempt from backup withholding. Do it again from the UK? Streamlined. But try Ghana, and suddenly TIN becomes mandatory despite there being no bilateral tax treaty with the US — so it adds 30% default withholding even on content entirely non-US.
“Google requires this information to determine the correct rate of withholding tax.” Yeah, except when it just doesn’t support your country at all.
Also, do not submit a new tax info form while the previous one is still under review. It will lock your account from displaying ads until human intervention unblocks it. Not documented. Just happened. Twice.
Local Language Content Handling Is… Not Handled
If your site is in a regional language (like Bengali, Hausa, or even Canadian French), AdSense might straight-up reject you unless your homepage includes at least one paragraph in English. This isn’t officially stated, but I’ve had two apps blocked with the message “Site content not accessible” — and in both cases, once I added an English blurb (even as a footer), the app went through.
And no, content language settings in the setup don’t override this. Nor does hreflang if the crawler chokes on Unicode meta tags written in non-Latin scripts. Found that out the hard way with a Georgian-language blog where the site title looked blank to AdSense’s crawler.
Two-Step Site Approval: Not Always Two Steps
This one’s vicious. Usually when you apply for AdSense, it’s: 1) account approved, 2) site review/approval. For certain countries, though — Lebanon, Pakistan, sometimes Bangladesh — I’ve seen a goofy extra step where they flag your domain as needing additional manual review even after the two official stages are done. No emails. Just no ads showing days after it says “Ready.”
Only fix that’s worked? Remove the site, wait 24 hours, re-add it. I wish I was making that up. The script below actually refreshed the review status somewhere in Google’s backend and finally triggered the crawler:
// using the Adsense Management API
gapi.client.adsense.accounts.sites.create({
parent: 'accounts/pub-123456789',
site: {
url: 'https://clientdomain.pk'
}
}).then(response => console.log(response));
Again, none of that’s in any UI or doc. Just tribal knowledge from a guy up at 2:30am wondering where the hell his ad units went.
Auto Ads Honor Regional Layouts Incorrectly
Short one: if you’re deploying Auto Ads on a site with non-Latin layout directions (e.g. Arabic right-to-left), sometimes the anchor ads spawn on the incorrect side of the screen. I noticed it when testing a Farsi-language site and the overlay appeared on the left edge — violating layout expectations and triggering user complaints about “overlaid content.”
Fix? Manually disable anchor ads for mobile in that region and switch to in-article placements instead. There’s no setting that lets you dictate alignment direction in AdSense itself.
Country-Specific Policy Blocks You’ll Never See Coming
Sometimes your site will get rejected because of “Program Policy Violations” that aren’t visible from the regular Policy Center. Found this out in Nigeria when a site got flagged for “copyrighted media” — but only on embedded YouTube Shorts… from their own channel.
Apparently, some international AdSense queues classify Shorts as external embeds unless explicitly whitelisted by the channel owner. Which we were. Still got denied. Only fix was to remove all Shorts embeds and replace them with standard YouTube links. Yup.
Helpful Stuff That’s Been Weirdly Consistent
On a lighter note, there are a few things that always seem to behave predictably across regions:
Custom search engine integration always works, even if AdSense is pending
The crawler respects robots.txt exclusions globally (surprisingly)
Performance reports normalize currency rate correctly, even for volatile FX markets
Ad size optimization never honors your settings — but at least does it equally badly everywhere
Not good, not bad. Just the same flavor of chaos anywhere you go.
