Website Down on Friday Evening: What Happens to Your Ads

Friday evening, and your website has stopped opening. Nobody noticed: customers are not calling because they have nowhere to go, and you are off for the weekend. On Monday someone will write: “Your site was down.” The question an owner cares about is what happened to the ads over those two days. Below: what Google says about it, what the risk is for search, and how to make sure you hear about a site outage first, in five minutes.

We checked the facts against Google’s help pages and the monitoring service’s own site on 27 October 2026. Menu item names depend on the interface version and may differ slightly.

1. Do ads stop by themselves

Short answer: do not count on it. Google does have a rule for this. In Google’s help the policy is called “Destination requirements”, and the relevant rule is “Destination not working”. Ads are disapproved if the page they lead to returns an HTTP error code to Google’s AdsBot crawler (AdsBot is the Google program that checks the quality of pages that ads point to). The help gives the examples 403, 404 and 500.

Two things in that help page are worth understanding:

• Google does not say how fast it notices. How many hours or days pass between a site going down and the ads being disapproved is not stated. That is why our video says “not right away”, not “after three hours”. We do not make up numbers, ours or anyone else’s.
• While an ad is showing, you pay for the clicks. If someone clicks the ad and lands on an error page, the click is already paid for and you got no lead.

There is another side: disapproving ads and suspending an account are different things. Google writes that it warns you at least 7 days before suspending an account. For an owner that is good news: your account will not be blocked overnight. But that is exactly why you should not rely on it as protection. It kicks in after the money is already spent.

2. Your site may open for you, but not for Google’s crawler

There is a sneaky situation: you open the site in a browser and everything works, while AdsBot gets an error. It happens when a site is protected against “unwanted” visitors by a firewall, a country block or a “you are not a robot” check. Our agency knowledge base (based on K2 materials, 2026) has a direct tip: test final URLs with the AdsBot user agent. You can do this in Chrome: Google’s help describes how to override the user agent with the Google crawler in developer tools.

For an owner without a technical background it is simpler to ask whoever looks after the site one question: “Does Google’s crawler (AdsBot) get a 200 response, meaning ‘all good’, from our landing page for ads?” You cannot do this part alone, but the question is specific.

3. What happens to search

Ads are only part of the story. If your site does not open, free search suffers too. According to Google Search Central (the page on HTTP status codes, network and DNS errors):

• when a server returns a 5xx error, Google’s crawler temporarily slows down crawling of the site;
• pages that are already indexed first stay in the index, but if the error becomes persistent, they are eventually dropped;
• how long that takes, the help does not say.

So “dropping out of search” is not a guarantee but a risk that grows with the length of the outage. One Friday evening is unlikely to break anything; several weeks is another matter.

A separate note on planned work. If you have to take a site offline on purpose, Google’s “Pause or disable a website” page recommends an informational page with a 503 status code (“temporarily unavailable”), and only briefly: for a temporary shutdown one to two days, for a whole site a few days at most. Longer than that, use a placeholder page with a 200 code. About closing a site even for a few weeks, Google says directly that it can hurt indexing. A useful detail: do not return a 503 for the robots.txt file, as that blocks crawling of the entire site.

4. What you can do yourself in five minutes

You need a free site availability check: a service opens your page on a schedule and writes to you if it does not respond. One such service is UptimeRobot (uptimerobot.com). We are not partners of this service and get nothing for mentioning it; it is just an example. There are others.

1. Sign up at uptimerobot.com with your own email.
2. Click “+ Add New Monitor”.
3. Choose the HTTP(s) type and paste your site address.
4. Choose who gets the notifications (Alert contacts): your email must be selected.
5. Click “Create monitor”.

The help does not say whether the service has an interface in other languages, so button names are given as in the English help.

What to add on top:

• Not only the home page. Add a separate monitor for the page your ads lead to. The site may open while the needed page does not.
• An email address you read at weekends. An alert that lands in a former employee’s inbox helps nobody.
• The check does one thing: it tells you the site is not responding. Whether your ads have stopped is not shown there: look in your Google Ads account or ask whoever runs it.

5. The free plan and where the catch is

According to the UptimeRobot pricing page (27 October 2026), the free plan gives 50 monitors checked every 5 minutes, with no bank card. For one site that is more than enough. Also free: a simple status page and three months of logs. SMS and voice calls cost extra.

Now a contradiction worth knowing about. The pricing page itself describes the free plan as “good for hobby and non-profit projects”. Several third-party reviews from 2024–2025 say that since December 2024 the free plan may be used only for personal purposes, not business. Against that: the service’s terms say it is available for any use, including commercial and business use, and an article in its knowledge hub, updated on 10 September 2026, states directly that commercial use on the free plan is allowed. We could not find in the primary sources when the restriction was lifted.

Our conclusion: under the current terms a business owner can use the free plan. But terms change, so before signing up open uptimerobot.com/terms and read them yourself. If the free plan does not suit you, look at the paid plans or another service.

6. What to do when the alert arrives

An alert “site is not responding” is not a reason to panic but a reason to check three things:

1. Open the site yourself, from a phone on mobile data, not only from a computer. That shows whether the site is down for everyone or only for you.
2. Write to whoever looks after the site and hosting. The causes are many, from an expired hosting payment to an error after an update. Finding them out is not your job; telling people quickly is.
3. If the site will not be back soon, pause your ads. You can do it in the Google Ads account or ask whoever manages it. A pause costs less than a click on an error page.

For what should work on your site even before ads are launched, see our checklist: Website checklist before advertising. And for how a settings mistake can hide a site from Google, see One checkbox and your site is gone from Google.

Summary

1. Ads will not necessarily stop by themselves: Google disapproves ads that lead to error pages but does not say how long that takes.
2. While an ad is showing, you pay for clicks to an unavailable site.
3. For search a long outage is a risk: pages with a persistent server error may eventually drop out of the index.
4. In five minutes set up a free site check (for example UptimeRobot) and add a separate monitor for the page your ads lead to.
5. Before signing up read the service’s terms: the sources disagree on commercial use of the free plan.

See how we set up and evaluate advertising in the Google Ads for business section.

Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we’ll look at your account and tell you where your ads lead and what happens if that page stops opening.