MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Bowing to growing pressure from consumer groups, Google has announced it will ban all payday loan ads from its site.
It's the first time Google has announced a global ban on ads for a broad category of financial products, the Washington Post noted. To this point, the search giant has prohibited ads for largely illicit activities such as selling guns, explosives and drugs.
Payday lenders will no longer be able to purchase ads that appear above search results for key terms under Google's AdWords program. But they will still appear in search results.
"We’ll continue to review the effectiveness of this policy, but our hope is that fewer people will be exposed to misleading or harmful products," Google global product policy director David Graff said in a blog post about the change.
Google had previously taken some steps to limit payday loan ads. The decision to ban them outright came in part after pressure from a coalition of civil liberties, consumer protection, and privacy groups that reached out to the search giant about the issue late last year, the Post explained.
Several states have issued rules governing how much payday lenders can charge in interest, and the CFPB plans to release proposed rules this year to address the small-dollar loan industry.