Our latest Ads Safety Report highlights a key trend from 2024: how AI is improving our ability to prevent fraudsters from ever showing ads to people.

For years, we've deployed our most advanced technologies to safeguard our ads platforms from bad actors. In 2024, we launched over 50 enhancements to our LLMs, which enabled more efficient and precise enforcement at scale. These updates sped up complex investigations, helping us identify bad actors and fraud signals — like illegitimate payment information — during account setup. This kept billions of policy-violating ads from ever showing to a consumer, while ensuring legitimate businesses can show ads to customers faster.

We also adapted our defenses against ever-evolving scams, notably the rise of AI-generated public figure impersonation ads. To fight back, we assembled a team of over 100 experts to develop countermeasures, such as updating our Misrepresentation policy to suspend advertisers that promote these scams. As a result, we were able to permanently suspend more than 700,000 offending advertiser accounts. This led to a 90% drop in reports of this kind of scam ad last year.

This is just a fraction of our ongoing work to keep the advertising ecosystem safe. Learn more in our 2024 Ads Safety Report.

For the first time ever, we are bringing the YouTube Works Awards to South Africa. The aim of these awards is to celebrate the most impactful and innovative advertising campaigns over the past 18 months.

There are 7 categories to choose from, all looking at brilliant storytelling, results, and effectiveness in leveraging YouTube to achieve a clear business impact. Some specific categories include:

• The Grand Prix Award — for the most captivating and original creative vision.
• The Hidden Gem Award — for the biggest impact through audience insights.
• The Tech Pioneer Award — for use of technology or AI in order to achieve more impact.

Participants can view the full list of categories and submit their entries (at no cost) on the YouTube Works Awards website by June 17, 2025.

Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in September 2025.