Google Ads API will reject Demand Gen display opt-out from December

Google Ads API will reject Demand Gen display opt-out from December

10 November 2026: From the week of 1 December, the Google Ads API will return an error for any attempt to set Demand Gen's campaign-level content network flag to false, moving Display control to the ad group. Advertisers and agencies with scripts that write that field need to change them before then, or campaign creation will start to fail.

Not yet independently verified. Google gives the week of 1 December without naming the day of the backfill, and the claim that serving will not change is its own. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

The field that stops working

Today network_settings.target_content_network can switch Display off for a whole Demand Gen campaign. From that week it defaults to true on new campaigns. Sending false, at creation or on update, returns OPERATION_NOT_PERMITTED_FOR_CONTEXT, so any pipeline that sets the value explicitly will break even if it has run unchanged for years.

Control moves to demand_gen_ad_group_settings.channel_controls.selected_channels.display and the channel strategies on each ad group. Google says the overall default for serving is unchanged.

How existing campaigns get rewritten

A backfill will touch every campaign where the flag is currently false. Google sets it to true and then adjusts the ad groups underneath, so that delivery is preserved:

• an ALL_CHANNELS strategy becomes ALL_OWNED_AND_OPERATED_CHANNELS
• ad groups that target Display together with other channels get selected_channels.display set to false
• ad groups that target only Display are set to PAUSED

Google says none of the backfilled campaigns will change their serving behaviour. The third rule deserves a closer look, however. A paused ad group is a visible status change, and any reporting or budget automation that alerts on status, or that re-enables paused groups on a schedule, could put an ad group back into service that the backfill meant to keep dark.

Before the first week of December

The practical work is an audit of two places. Campaign creation payloads and automated workflows need the campaign-level field removed or set to true, with Display handled at the ad group instead. Existing ad groups need a review of their channel configuration, for which Google supplies a GAQL query in its post.

Third-party tools are a separate exposure. A bid management or campaign builder that wraps the API will have its own release date for this change, and an agency running several of them should ask each vendor when its fix ships, since the error appears at write time rather than at reporting time.

Google's post names the week and not the day, so changes should be finished by the end of November. We list Google Ads among 15 PPC software products.

Related on TrustList:

• Google Ads API moves to two releases a month starting with v26

Sources

• Google Ads Developer Blog, November 2026, 9 November 2026