Google Ads election ads: the altered or synthetic checkbox

Google's political content policy says advertisers must disclose all election ads that contain synthetic or digitally altered content by selecting the checkbox in the "Altered or synthetic content" section of their campaign settings. Google generates the disclosure itself only for some formats; for the rest, you provide a prominent disclosure.

This is a summary of two Google Ads policy pages, read 2026-09-30, plus what Sume's docs say about burning text onto video. It is not legal advice; check the policy text for your campaign.

Which election ads does the checkbox cover?

Content that makes a person appear to say or do something they did not say or do, or footage altered to depict scenes that did not actually take place. The policy exempts edits such as resizing, cropping, color or brightness corrections, defect correction like red-eye removal, and background edits that are inconsequential to the claims.

Which formats get an automatic disclosure?

The policy page lists the cases where Google auto-generates it, and says everything else is on the advertiser.

Does the July 2026 AI label setting replace the checkbox?

No, not for election ads. The July 2026 update page says election ads should select the checkbox per the political content policy rather than use the new AI label feature. That page also notes that using the AI label setting does not guarantee compliance with specific regulations.

How do I add a manual disclosure line to a video?

Google's example wording includes "Altered or synthetic content" and "This audio was computer generated". On Sume you can burn authored copy onto a video without speech-to-text: pass cues (or segments) with text, start and end to the video captions route, and it burns exactly that copy at those times. This works for silent clips too.

For an avatar video, the optional captions field burns styles into the final MP4 using the spoken script; see avatar videos. Neither route files the checkbox. You upload the finished MP4 to your own ad account and select it there. For other platforms, see the disclosure checklist by platform.