RSA Headlines That Pass Google's Editorial Review (And Why 80% Don't)
Last month I ran an editor's-eye pre-flight on twelve client RSAs (Responsive Search Ads, 响应式搜索广告) before they went live. Forty-three of the sixty headlines I'd been handed had at least one red flag Google's editorial review would catch. Most of them would still get approved — the bar is lower than people think. But "approved" and "actually good" are different games, and the gap is where budgets leak.
Here is the taxonomy I use, in the order Google's own checker tends to flag things.
1. The capitalization tells. All caps in a headline ("FREE SHIPPING") gets rejected in seconds. The sneakier case is Title Case On Every Important Word — it reads as shouting without technically violating the rule. A safer move: one proper-noun cap at the start, sentence case after that. "Get free shipping on orders $50+" passes; "Get FREE SHIPPING On Orders $50+" does not.
2. The punctuation flourish. "Buy Now!!!" is the canonical example. The dodgier version is "Buy Now ✓" with a checkmark — Unicode glyphs with no functional purpose are getting flagged more often than they used to, especially on accounts that have taken a prior policy warning. Since early 2024 (no official blog post — just observed behavior across accounts I run), decorative symbols are a coin flip.
3. The dependency trap. RSA combinations get tested, but Google won't always pair headline 2 with headline 5. If your headline 2 says "starting at" and headline 5 says "$99", they may never appear together. The fix: write every headline as if it has to stand alone. A standalone headline is "Orthopedic shoes from $89." A dependent one is "from $89" — that one should not ship.
4. The repetition wall. You submitted 15 headlines and nine of them start with "best" or "official" or "trusted." Each one is technically unique, but Google's ad strength checker reads them as near-duplicates and drops your strength to "Average." This is the silent killer — your ad runs, your CTR (Click-Through Rate, 点击率) is fine, your strength indicator is just stuck.
5. The "weird but in-spec" case. Slang, idioms that don't translate, in-jokes about your own product, regional phrases that read as unprofessional. None of these get auto-flagged, but a human reviewer's first read will mark them. In the audit I mentioned, two of the twelve RSAs had a "starting at" headline that, paired with the wrong description, read like a tabloid banner.
The fix is not to write fewer headlines. It is to write fewer types of headlines. Three angles — price, feature, urgency — with four variations each beats fifteen variations on one angle. Your strength indicator moves from Average to Good, your combinations actually serve, and your next approval does not depend on a coin flip the next time Google tightens the rules.
For one e-commerce client, that audit moved Ad Strength from Poor to Excellent and lifted click-through rate by 18% in three weeks. The headline count did not change. The variety did. Run that audit on your own account before the next RSA goes live — the half hour it takes usually saves a quarter of wasted impression share.