Google Ads advertiser verification requirements come down to two questions, each with paperwork behind it: who pays for these ads, and who is advertising. You answer with a legal name and a country, and back them with a government ID or a business's registration papers. Google then shows that verified name to the people who see the ads. Which documents count depends on the country, so the list for yours is on Google's own help page.
What matters more than the documents is what they join. Once an account is verified, it belongs to a named person or business, and every other account verified under that name belongs to the same advertiser.
Google Ads advertiser verification requirements, step by step
The request arrives in the account itself, with a deadline, and ads can stop running if it passes without an answer. The shape of what follows is the same everywhere, even where the details are not:
- Whether you advertise for yourself or for someone else. An agency running a client's campaigns says so here.
- Whether you verify as an individual or as an organisation.
- The legal name and the country, which have to match the documents.
- The documents: a government photo ID for a person; for an organisation, registration papers, and often the ID of someone allowed to act for it.
- Some questions about the business: what it sells, and whether it provides that itself or resells it.
The common failures are dull ones: a name on the account that does not match the name on the document, an ID that cannot be read, a document of a type that country does not accept. None of them is fixed by anything outside the paperwork.
For some kinds of business there is more. Google runs further checks on advertisers in sensitive categories, and those can go as far as licences. That is a separate programme with its own page.
Each profile keeps its own passwords and its own 2FA codesIn Mosaic: Logins and 2FA codes. A password vault and TOTP codes for each profile. Free holds 3 profiles. Pro is $49 a month for any number.
Mosaic is a desktop app
Email yourself the link and open it on your computer.
How it works: Logins and 2FA codes
What verification joins together
Verification is not a box ticked once. It is the moment an ad account stops being a login and becomes a legal person.
The verified name is shown to people who see the ads, and Google keeps it with the account. The payments profile that pays for the ads carries a name too. So after verification an advertiser is a stack of facts that agree with each other: a name, a country, a document, a payment method, and the accounts under them.
That is why a second account is a policy question rather than a technical one. Two Google Ads accounts verified under the same legal name are, to Google, the same advertiser in two places. If one of them is suspended, the name is what the suspension is about. A "separate" advertiser identity would have to be a genuinely different legal person or business with its own documents, and creating one to get around an enforcement decision is exactly what Google's rules on circumventing its systems are written against.
No browser setting changes that, ours included. A fingerprint, a cookie jar and a proxy exit are about which computer and which session; verification is about a name on a document. We would rather say that plainly than let anyone think the second problem can be solved with the tools for the first. Meta joins things up the same way through business verification, which we read in what Meta business verification connects.
What agencies do instead
The structure Google built for agencies is the manager account. One agency login links to many client accounts, and each client verifies as itself, so its own name is the one checked and shown with its ads. The client stays the advertiser of record. When the work ends, the link is removed and the client keeps everything. The browser-side version of that day-one set-up, partner and manager access before passwords, is in the first hour with a new client.
Where Mosaic fits is narrower, and true. An agency still signs in to client things that are not inside a manager account: the client's Google Business Profile, a Merchant Center the client set up years ago, a YouTube channel. Each of those can live in that client's own profile, with its own cookies and its own exit in the client's market, so one client's session never sits in another's window. Naming each profile the way the ad account is named, so the two lists read the same, is in naming profiles after ad accounts.
Google's terms decide which accounts you may run and under whose name. Mosaic keeps the accounts you are entitled to run apart; it does not change what a platform allows. The mechanics of how accounts get linked in the first place, cookies, fingerprint, address and behaviour, are in managing multiple accounts without getting linked.
