Google describes Display & Video 360 (DV360) sensitive-category exclusions on three pages, and each gives a different scope. The Q3 help page says sensitive categories and digital content labels, “except for content not yet rated,” will be deprecated for programmatic inventory. The API deprecations page says that from October 1 you “will no longer be able to exclude the majority of sensitive categories” when assigning line item targeting. The brand suitability page, as fetched on October 11, still says both “can also be excluded for an advertiser.”
How many sensitive category values did the DV360 API deprecate?
The v4 SensitiveCategory enum lists a placeholder plus 19 values, and 17 of the 19 carry the label “This item is deprecated!” on Google’s enum reference, last updated October 1. They are the same 17 values the deprecations page says will no longer be accepted when assigning exclusions. The two without the label are SENSITIVE_, described as “YouTube videos embedded on websites outside of YouTube.com”, and SENSITIVE_, “Video of live events streamed over the internet.”
Three pages, three scopes
| Google page | What it says about scope |
|---|---|
| Q3 help page Last updated August 21, future tense |
Sensitive categories and digital content labels, “except for content not yet rated,” will be deprecated for programmatic inventory |
| API deprecations Last updated August 27 |
“the majority of sensitive categories”; 17 values named; specific digital content labels too |
| Brand suitability As fetched October 11 |
Both “can also be excluded for an advertiser”; no mention of October 1 |
The deprecated list runs from adult and alcohol to violence and weapons, and includes gambling, tobacco and drugs. The content label side matches the Q3 help page’s exception. The v4 ContentRatingTier reference marks five values deprecated (general, parental guidance, teens, mature, families) and leaves CONTENT_, “Content that has not been labeled”, unmarked.
The two values without the label describe video formats. The brand suitability page lists an “Other content types (livestream or embeds)” control among its advertiser-level settings. The wording resembles the two enum descriptions, but none of the pages quoted here says they are the same thing.
PPC Land, in a report published October 11, says the August 27 developer post said the majority of sensitive categories could no longer be excluded and did not list which ones survive. It also says the Q3 help page announcement contains “no count of affected advertisers, no mapping from old categories to new themes, and no migration tool.” The deprecations page does name the 17 values that go.
What changes in Line Item SDFs and uploads
The deprecations page lists three file-level changes:
- The
Brand Safety Sensitivity Settingcolumn will no longer allow the option “Use custom”. - The
Brand Safety Custom Settingscolumn will no longer be supported and “will be populated with an empty value on download.” - The
Digital Content Labels - Excludecolumn will only allow the option “?”, otherwise it must be empty, and any other value “will result in an error on upload.”
A downloaded file will therefore carry nothing in the custom settings column, which means a fresh export will not show in that column what a line item excluded before. That is a reading of the empty value, not a statement from Google. The page does not say what happened to exclusions already on line items, and neither does any other page cited here.
What replaces the named categories
The Q3 help page says sensitive categories and content labels “are now integrated into the simplified Inventory mode and content themes”, and that you no longer need to manage duplicative settings because they are consolidated into three inventory modes (Maximum, Moderate, Limited) and 10 content themes. It gives no mapping from an old category to a mode or theme.
The brand suitability page names the ten themes: Content Suitable for Families, Games (fighting), Games (mature), Health (sensitive), Health (source undetermined) (marked YouTube only), News (recent), News (sensitive), News (source not featured), Politics and Religion. None is named for gambling, alcohol, tobacco, drugs or weapons. The same page still documents keyword exclusions, channel and URL exclusions, and third-party verification.
The Q3 help page says audio line items will use “the same advanced, machine-learning-driven Inventory mode suitability protections as YouTube.” The brand suitability page says audio inventory “isn’t supported by third-party brand safety targeting.” Our piece on the four experimental ad metrics Chrome added to CrUX cited Digiday’s report that Google did not disclose whether DV360 is testing those signals for inventory evaluation, bidding or reporting.
The same Q3 help page also carries a February 2027 entry that moves billed display impression counting in Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360 from on-download to begin to render. We covered the begin-to-render impression counting change for Ad Manager and AdSense, where it lands on February 17, 2027. For the brand suitability change, the first check is a downloaded Line Item SDF: look at the custom settings column, then look for any template or script that still writes a value other than “?” into the content label exclude column, because Google says that upload will return an error.