Why crypto brands cannot buy their way to visibility

In most industries, a brand that loses organic visibility can buy it back. Search advertising is the pressure valve: rankings slip, budget rises, the pipeline holds while the underlying problem gets fixed.

Crypto does not have that valve, and the reasons are worth stating precisely rather than gesturing at. They are not a temporary crackdown. They are a permanent narrowing of one channel, which changes what the remaining channels are worth.

What it takes to advertise an exchange or wallet in the EEA

Google’s cryptocurrencies policy sets two conditions, and both must hold.

The advertiser must be authorised as a Crypto-Asset Service Provider under MiCA by a relevant national competent authority. And, separately, the advertiser must also be certified with Google.

Most coverage stops at the first condition, which is where a costly misunderstanding starts.

The licence passports. The permission does not.

A CASP authorisation granted by any one national competent authority carries passporting rights across the EEA. One licence, obtained once, lets a firm serve the bloc. That is the entire point of the regime, and it is a genuine simplification of the patchwork that came before.

Google’s certification does not work that way. It is granted against targeted locations, and the policy is explicit about the consequence: if your targeted location is not on the approved list, the products cannot be advertised there at all.

So a firm can be fully, lawfully licensed to operate across the EEA and still be unable to run a campaign in a given market, because the licence and the ad permission are separate instruments granted by separate parties on separate timetables. The regulatory question and the distribution question have the same inputs and different answers.

That gap has been closing on a country-by-country schedule rather than all at once, with national transitional arrangements expiring at different dates and individual markets being added as they qualified. The direction is toward coverage. The mechanism has never been “get licensed, advertise everywhere”.

What no licence unlocks

A second category is not gated on authorisation. It is simply not permitted.

Ads promoting initial coin offerings, DeFi trading protocols, or the purchase, sale or trade of cryptocurrencies are not allowed. Nor are initial DEX offerings, token liquidity pools, or unhosted software wallets.

That last one deserves attention, because it is an asymmetry rather than a prohibition on a bad actor. A custodial product, correctly licensed, can be advertised. A self-custody wallet — the thing that removes counterparty risk entirely — cannot be, regardless of how reputable it is. The paid channel structurally favours the custodial side of a trade that has real arguments on both sides.

The rule that catches publications

Google also does not permit ad destinations that aggregate or compare issuers of cryptocurrencies or related products — naming aggregators and affiliate sites containing broker reviews among the examples.

Read that against what most crypto media actually publishes. Exchange comparisons, “best wallet” rankings, broker reviews: the dominant commercial format in the vertical is a destination that cannot be advertised.

Including this one. Cryptonist publishes an index that compares crypto brands. We could not buy a single click to it if we wanted to. That is not a complaint — it is the cleanest available demonstration of the argument. A publication whose core asset is a comparison has no paid distribution route to it, and must be found some other way or not at all.

The second squeeze

The obvious workaround is to stop advertising and pay other people to talk about you. MiCA anticipated that.

Marketing communications must be fair, clear and not misleading — and the obligation does not stop at the brand’s own output. A CASP is answerable for how third parties promote it, which puts affiliates, influencers and brand ambassadors inside the compliance perimeter rather than outside it. Penalties for CASP non-compliance run to €5 million or 5% of annual turnover.

This is what makes the influencer-and-PR product that dominates crypto marketing a worse deal than its price suggests. The spend buys reach and transfers regulatory liability to the brand, for content the brand did not write and cannot fully control. Paying more does not reduce that exposure. It increases the surface.

What is left

Strip out paid search in the markets where certification has not landed, strip out the categories no licence unlocks, and discount outsourced promotion by the liability it carries, and the channels that remain are the ones a brand owns outright: its own content, its organic search visibility, and — increasingly — what AI assistants say when someone asks them a question instead of typing it into a search box.

That last channel has no certification process at all. Nobody can buy a position in it. It is determined by what gets published, cited and repeated — which is exactly why it is worth measuring, and why this publication measures it monthly.

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Sources: Google Ads cryptocurrencies and related products policy and its August 2026 update. Policy and licensing requirements change; this piece states the position as reviewed on the date above.