We wrote about a sexy bunny girl video game and Google torched our ad revenue. Thoughts and prayers appreciated 

Ads powered by Google on Automaton Japan, the Japanese leg of our site, recently took a hit – and it’s kind of the biggest blow our editorial department has ever seen.

To walk you through what happened – on April 25, developer qureate announced Hebereke Bunny Garden, a new action spin-off game based on the bunny girl dating sim Bunny Garden. Naturally, we reported on the news – however, the article has caused a bit of a mess for us: our Google-powered ads have been restricted across the site. 

Here’s how it works: we embed a bit of Google AdSense ads within our articles – this brings in revenue based on how many impressions/clicks the page gets. However, if the content of an article is found to be in violation of Google’s policies, ad revenue gets halted for it. And it looks like our article on Bunny Garden set something off, the result being a nasty dent in our ad revenue.

This is the article in question, and as you can see – yes, the screenshots are a little risqué, but a far cry from explicit. The text of the article is even more innocent, simply giving an overview of the game. Nevertheless, Google AdSense seems to have decided that it qualifies as “adult content.” As a result, ads on the article have been restricted. 

It would have been great if that were the full extent of the damage, but we were lucky enough to have a series of unrelated articles flagged as adult content and stripped of ad revenue. It goes without saying, but there’s nothing remotely sexy about these other articles, some examples being this announcement of Puzzle & Dragons Zero and this article about Switch 2 game key cards. In fact, just about every article posted on Automaton Japan on April 24 and 25 got caught in the crossfire. 

But how did one Bunny Garden article set off a barrage of Google policy violations? It’s likely that Google has qureate titles flagged in advance. Maybe it’s the result of accumulated AI-based judgement, but it seems Google is out to get any coverage of qureate games, even if there’s nothing explicit about it. Moreover, our article on Hebereke Bunny Garden blew up pretty nicely – over 10k reposts over on X, big spikes in impressions and all. I think Google’s system saw all the traffic and panicked, handing out violations left and right. 

To make matters worse, our site displays a “most popular articles” ranking, which features small 78×78-pixel thumbnails. Due to its popularity, the Hebereke Bunny Garden article ended up on that list, meaning that it was displayed on all article pages. Perhaps even that tiny thumbnail (or its URL) set off more alarms, dragging unrelated articles into the mess. 

Now, technically, you can request Google to re-review its judgement. But news articles, especially announcements, are time-sensitive – people read them right after they go live. On the other hand, applying for a review takes about a week. Even if a mistaken decision is rescinded, by then it’s way too late to matter. 

To be clear, none of this is qureate’s fault. The responsibility lies with us, the publication. And if anything, it’s proof that Google does actually check content pretty closely before running ads, so this kind of thing is bound to happen now and then. Still, as a publication, we can’t help but feel a bit wronged. And since the incident has impacted our revenue, we’ve chosen to cope in the only way we know – by turning it into more content.