What if your ads aren’t reaching the people you want, but are still showing up in places you never approved? That’s the hidden problem with keyword overblocking and underblocking. When you overblock, your brand loses visibility in safe and relevant environments, allowing competitors to dominate the spaces you should have owned. When you underblock, your ads risk appearing next to unsafe or irrelevant content, hurting your brand reputation and audience trust.
This creates a clear domino effect: lost reach, weaker impact, wasted budgets, and declining brand credibility. And most brands don’t even realize that these issues start with one flawed assumption; that keyword blocking alone can keep their ads safe.
In this blog, we break down why keyword blocking as a brand safety strategy is fundamentally limited, what brands really need to understand about ad placement quality, and how they can make better, context-aware decisions. We’ll also explore how mFilterIt’s brand safety solution gives you accurate, real-time visibility and ensures your ads show up exactly where they should, without compromising reach or brand reputation.
What is Underblocking and Overblocking of Ad Placements and What Causes Them?
Underblocking happens when ads appear next to content that is unsafe, unsuitable, or misaligned with the brand’s image. This includes news about violence, misinformation, hate speech, extremist views, or overly negative content.
What causes underblocking of ad placements?
- Relying only on basic keyword blocklists methods
- No understanding of page-level meaning, intent, or sentiment
- Filters that cannot interpret regional languages or cultural context
- Lack of monitoring of publishers, apps, or channels
- Limited detection of low-quality or fraudulent environments
Overblocking occurs when ads are restricted from being placed next to content that is actually safe, relevant, and appropriate. This reduces delivery scale and prevents ads from reaching potential audiences.
What causes overblocking of ad placements?
- Relying on broad keyword filters
- One-size-fits-all global safety settings
- Filters unable to differentiate between informational vs harmful content
- Blocking entire topics or domains due to a single keyword
- Misinterpretation of regional or cultural content
Consequences of Keyword Overblocking and Underblocking: What Advertisers Miss
Many advertisers feel that keyword-based filters are enough to prevent their ads from unsafe placements. This has been their go-to strategy for brand safety. However, this approach leaves huge gaps in the process of brand safety and protection. Keyword systems only catch what they are explicitly asked for, leading to overblocking or underblocking of ad placements in many scenarios.
For example, a family-focused FMCG brand’s ad may appear beside a YouTube video with explicit visuals, even though the video title contains harmless keywords. Without visual and sentiment analysis, the placement slips through keyword filters, allowing the ad to run beside inappropriate content that damages brand perception.
This is an example of underblocking and here are the consequences underblocking of ad placements leads to:
Brand Safety Concerns
When ads appear next to harmful or controversial content, consumers may directly associate the brand with negativity. A single unsafe ad placement can trigger brand reputation risks and backlash across social platforms.
Exposure to Fraud or Low-Quality Traffic
Underblocking often means ads might show up on low-quality MFA websites or spam pages, leading to inflated impressions and wasted spending.
Poor Conversion Efficiency
Ads may appear in irrelevant or unsafe environments, where users are less likely to engage or convert—driving up CPA and reducing return on ad spend.
Compliance & Suitability Failures
Regulated industries like BFSI, healthcare, or kids’ categories face stricter content rules. Underblocking increases the risk of ads appearing in restricted categories.
Let’s take an example of overblocking. This approach cuts advertisers off from massive amounts of safe, high-quality content. An article with a headline like “Virat Kohli’s cover drive continues to kill it this season” triggers the word ‘kill’ (in the keyword blocklist) even though the tone is celebratory and the content is 100% safe. Yet sports advertisers lose access to one of the most engaged audiences in India.
Here are the consequences overblocking of ad placements leads to:
Loss of High-Quality Inventory
High-quality audiences and impressions on safe and suitable pages are blocked due to overly broad filters, shrinking available inventory.
Limited Reach & High Media Costs
Campaigns struggle to meet delivery goals because a large number of potential placements are unnecessarily excluded. When inventory is restricted, competition increases. CPMs, CPCs, and CPA all rise, impacting efficiency.
Missed Opportunities
During festivals, sports events, elections, or national news moments, content volumes surge. Overblocking prevents advertisers from leveraging these high-engagement opportunities.
How Advertisers Can Avoid Overblocking and Underblocking of Ad Placements
To avoid underblocking and overblocking, advertisers need to leverage advanced brand safety solutions to evaluate each ad placement not just by keywords but by what the content means, what message it communicates, its sentiment, and how it is interpreted in a regional context.
Analyse Placements Based on Content
Understanding the actual subject of a page (and just matching keywords) helps ensure ads appear in relevant, safe environments. Content-level analysis prevents brands from unintentionally blocking large volumes of safe inventory simply because they contain a certain word, phrase, or product reference. This safeguards scale without compromising suitability.
Analyse Placements Based on Context
Context determines whether a keyword appears in an informative, neutral, or harmful environment. Contextual targeting helps advertisers distinguish between high-quality content and genuinely unsafe pages. This prevents underblocking on risky pages and overblocking on harmless ones, improving both brand safety and delivery efficiency.
Analyse Sentiment to Understand Tone of the Content
Sentiment analysis evaluates whether the content is positive, neutral, or negative. Even if the topic is safe, negative sentiment can misalign with brand values. Sentiment filters help advertisers avoid negative associations while still accessing neutral or positive content that offers high engagement potential.
Analyse Regional Nuances of the Ad Placements
In diverse countries like India, regional content often includes multilingual terms, cultural references, slang, and context-specific meanings. Generic filters miss these nuances, leading to misclassification and misalignment of content. Brand safety solutions with regional intelligence filters help advertisers stay safe across diverse markets while maintaining access to culturally rich, high-engagement content that drives scale.
Avoid One-Size-Fits-All Filters
Different brands have different risk thresholds. Applying the same keyword blocklists across all campaigns and platforms restricts scale and may not align with brand guidelines. A customized brand suitability framework ensures ads appear only in environments aligned with a brand’s values while optimising reach.
Continuously Monitor & Optimize Blocking Rules
Content ecosystems evolve rapidly. Continuous monitoring helps advertisers identify which impressions were blocked, which placements drove better performance, and where contextual misclassifications occurred. Adjusting rules regularly ensures that brand safety settings remain relevant and aligned with performance goals.
Partner with Brand Safety Solution Providers Offering Transparent Content, Regional, and Contextual Analysis
Advanced brand safety solutions offer page-level analysis, regional language detection, sentiment scoring, and supply-path transparency. This helps advertisers avoid basic filtering and instead use granular insights to allow or block pages intelligently, preserving scale while ensuring complete safety.
Know more about why brand safety also needs a full-funnel approach.
How mFilterIt’s Advanced Solution Helps Ensure Brand Safety
Unsafe placements appear in video, web, regional languages, slang, sentiment-driven content, and even high-performing categories advertisers usually consider safe. mFilterIt’s brand solution – PACE fixes this problem with deeper, multi-layered analysis that goes far beyond keyword filtering. Here’s how it works:
Understands what the content actually means
Our AI-powered brand safety tool analyses the content, context, and sentiment of every placement, including visuals, text, and thumbnails, so ads avoid being placed beside violence, nudity, misinformation, and harmful content.
Flags visual risks that keywords miss
It scans videos frame by frame to catch explicit visuals, disturbing scenes, and inappropriate gestures, critical for platforms where risk appears visually, not in text.
Classifies placements based on GARM guidelines & brand unsafe categories
All placements are tagged under global risk buckets like violence, hate speech, adult content, and obscenity, giving advertisers clarity on what’s safe and unsafe.
Understands regional languages and cultural nuances
Our brand safety tool recognises regional slang, tone, and cultural cues, preventing both underblocking on unsafe vernacular content and overblocking on safe cultural content.
Checks the safety of websites and ad placement inventory
Before your ads appear, mFilterIt verifies domain history, ownership, credibility, and past safety incidents to avoid low-quality MFA sites or suspicious inventory, ensuring your ads show only on trusted pages.
Provides omnichannel brand safety coverage
Our solution works across video platforms, web placements, apps, programmatic channels, and streaming environments, giving brands consistent safety controls wherever their ads appear.
Maximizes premium inventory during major events
Instead of overblocking content around cultural moments, sports tournaments, news spikes, or festivals, mFilterIt helps advertisers safely access high-engagement, premium placements by understanding sentiment and context accurately.
Reduces wasted ad spend
By blocking unsafe videos and harmful inventory, it ensures your budget is spent only on brand-safe, relevant, high-quality impressions, significantly reducing wastage.
Conclusion
Ensuring brand safety should not come at the cost of reach or performance. With deeper content understanding, contextual, and regional intelligence, advertisers can avoid being stuck in the loop of underblocking and overblocking.
mFilterIt helps you enable this balance with precision. So, if your goal is safer and efficient ad placements and stronger ROI, it’s time to upgrade your brand safety approach.
Speak to our team to know how we can help.
