Google’s Ad Transparency tool no longer shows political online advertisements that ran on its platforms, in the past or present, from any countries in the European Union, making seven years of data from 27 different countries inaccessible.

Liz Carolan, who publishes Irish technology and politics newsletter The Briefing, spotted the change on September 28. Carolan noticed that until last week, Google’s Ad Transparency tool would allow visitors to search ads that have run in countries in the EU going back to 2018, including data about who was targeted, how much was spent on each ad, and for what candidates or parties. This week, political ads from Ireland as well as the other 26 countries in the EU are gone from the Ad Transparency political ads country selection page.

“We had been told that Google would try to stop people placing political ads, a ‘ban’ that was to come into effect this week. I did not read anywhere that this would mean the erasure of this archive of our political history,” Carolan wrote.

The change is in response to the EU’s upcoming Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA), a law set to enter full force on October 10. The TTPA lays out new regulations for advertisers in the EU, including requirements that political ads “must be clearly labelled as such and include information on who paid for it, to which election, referendum, legislative or regulatory process it is linked and whether targeting or ad-delivery techniques have been used,” according to an EU summary of the law, and limits targeting and ad delivery of political advertising to strict conditions, including requiring consent from ads’ targets that their data be used for political advertising. Certain categories of demographic data, like racial or ethnic origin or political opinions, can’t be used for profiling by advertisers.

On August 5, Google posted new guidelines for political ads in EU countries, and said that past ads would still be accessible in the Transparency Center: “As of September 2025, the EU Political Ads Transparency report will be no longer available. However, EU Election Ads previously shown in the Political Ads Transparency Report will remain publicly accessible in the Ads Transparency Center, subject to retention policies.”

In July, Meta also announced it would no longer allow “political, electoral and social issue ads” on its platforms in the EU, “given the unworkable requirements and legal uncertainties” introduced by the TTPA. Past ads from the EU are still visible on Meta’s ad library.

The law dictates that online ads will be available in “an online European repository,” but that repository hasn’t launched yet. Researchers and journalists rely on tools like Google’s Ad Transparency platform and Meta’s similar platform for information on who was running political ads and how; now, they’ll have to wait for that repository to launch.

Google announced in November 2024 that it would stop serving political ads in the EU in October 2025, ahead of the TTPA. “Additionally, paid political promotions, where they qualify as political ads under the TTPA, will no longer be permitted on YouTube in the EU,” Google’s Vice President for Government Affairs and Public Policy for Europe Annette Kroeber-Riel wrote in a company blog post.

“The European Union’s upcoming Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) unfortunately introduces significant new operational challenges and legal uncertainties for political advertisers and platforms,” Kroeber-Riel wrote. “For example, the TTPA defines political advertising so broadly that it could cover ads related to an extremely wide range of issues that would be difficult to reliably identify at scale. There is also a lack of reliable local election data permitting consistent and accurate identification of all ads related to any local, regional or national election across any of 27 EU Member States. And key technical guidance may not be finalized until just months before the regulation comes into effect.” The law is vague, but doesn’t specifically require platforms to delete past ads. It’s likely that many of the ads stored by Google in the Transparency Center would be in violation of the law today, however; instead of combing through hundreds of thousands of ads, it’s possible Google just removed the entire EU.

Google did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.
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An update on political advertising in the European Union

Google will stop serving political advertising in the EU ahead of new regulation in October 2025.

^{Annette Kroeber-Riel (Google)}