Google added a data control to AdSense on June 1, 2026, that lets a publisher attach the untruncated IP to each programmatic bid request. The feature is off by default. Publishers who do nothing keep the existing behavior, where the final octet of each IPv4 address is withheld before the request reaches demand sources.
The stakes are specific. A standard IPv4 address such as 93.184.216.34 currently reaches buyers as 93.184.216.0. That single withheld segment may sound minor, but it collapses city-level geolocation precision to a subnet range, weakens invalid-traffic detection systems that cross-reference host addresses against known fraud databases, and degrades frequency estimation in cookieless environments where buyers rely on IP as a probabilistic household proxy. According to Google’s documentation, “many buyers consider the full IP address a critical signal for assessing the quality and relevance of an ad impression.”
Three demand channels receive the expanded signal when a publisher opts in: Authorized Buyers, Display and Video 360, and Google Ads. The control is all-or-nothing. No selective routing by channel is available.
Finding the setting requires some navigation. The toggle lives at Brand safety, then Content, then Blocking controls, then Manage Ad serving, inside the Personalized ads subsection. One detail to note before clicking: the control sits inside a blocking interface, so the on position means the block is active and the off position removes it. To share the full IP, a publisher disables the toggle, then saves. PPC Land’s June 1 report was first to flag this counter-intuitive direction, which mirrors the buyer-side control Google shipped late in 2025.
Not all requests qualify even after opting in. Google restricts full IP sharing on three categories: non-personalized ads (NPA), limited ads (LTD), and restricted-data-processing (RDP) requests. NPA requests cover users who declined behavioral targeting consent. LTD requests govern non-consented traffic under TCF v2.3, which became mandatory in March 2026. RDP requests cover users in US states with active privacy laws, a list Google has extended repeatedly, adding Indiana, Kentucky, and Rhode Island among others. Publishers with material European traffic or US audiences in regulated states will see a meaningful share of impressions remain on the truncated path regardless of the account setting.
The publisher trade-off is real. Buyers who value the full IP signal may bid more aggressively on opted-in inventory, particularly for campaigns with city-level targeting or heavy fraud-screening requirements. The potential CPM benefit is not guaranteed and depends on the buyer mix, the geographic spread of the audience, and the ad category. On the other side, an IP address counts as personal data in the European Union. Regulators there have said so consistently, and the Belgian DPA’s 2022 ruling on the Transparency and Consent Framework specifically addressed IP data flows in real-time bidding. Publishers serving European users who enable this feature add a compliance question their legal and consent-management teams need to answer. The off-by-default design delegates that decision entirely to publishers, along with any associated responsibility.
This is one of several data-sharing expansions Google has layered into the AdSense Brand safety area over the past year, among them an auto-enrollment into consent optimization earlier in 2026 and a comparable buyer-side IP control late in 2025. The pattern holds: an optional expansion that starts from the most restricted state.
Publishers should audit the toggle in their AdSense accounts within the next 90 days, map what share of their impressions are personalized and consent-eligible, and weigh that potential revenue exposure against their privacy stance and applicable regulatory obligations before changing the default.
PPC Land reported the AdSense full IP address sharing feature on June 1, 2026, including the counter-intuitive toggle direction and the automatic exclusions for consent-restricted requests.
