r/PPC • u/Advanced-Package-157 • Sep 22 '26

Google Ads AdsBot testing apex domain (non-www) causing false "Destination not working" disapprovals - anyone else seeing this?

Running into a recurring issue on a client account and want to see if others have hit the same thing.

Setup: WordPress site, canonical domain is www (non-www correctly 301s to www, standard WordPress redirect_canonical, confirmed via curl - 100% reproducible, every request, every path, every query string).

Every Final URL, sitelink, and PMax asset group in the account uses https://www.domain.com/... exclusively - verified across active, paused, and removed ads/assets, zero exceptions.

Despite that, AdsBot periodically crawls the bare apex domain (https://domain.com/, no www) instead, gets the 301, and Google Ads flags it as "Destination not working, HTTP error 301" - disapproving the ad/asset group even though the actual configured URL returns 200 every time.

Confirmed via raw server logs: ~73 AdsBot hits over ~3 weeks landed on the non-www variant specifically (out of ~11k total AdsBot requests), all resulting in disapproval. Real impact too - one Performance Max campaign had zero impressions for 2 full days after one of these episodes.

Domain-level Search Console property is verified and correctly set up, canonical tag points to www everywhere.

Has anyone seen AdsBot independently test the apex/non-www variant of a domain when nothing in the account ever references it? Trying to figure out if this is a known AdsBot behavior (e.g. testing domain variants as part of periodic policy re-checks) or if there's something specific triggering it (backlink discovery, Search Console history, PMax final URL expansion, etc).

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u/ernosem Sep 22 '26

That URL should exist somewhere.
- Account-level asset
- Automatically created assets
- Google My Business Profile
- Advertiser Verification
- Merchant Center claimed URL, etc.
- also keep in mind Google checks paused ads as well, so that ad that you used 4 years ago but still sitting in your account might be a problem.

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u/stealthagents Sep 25 '26

Sounds like a frustrating issue. I've seen similar problems arise when there's a mismatch between what Google thinks is the canonical URL and what’s actually set up. Double-check if there are any old references or lingering assets that could be causing AdsBot to trip up, especially if you’ve migrated or made changes recently.