[ocdtrekkie]

Actually, I spoke to a Googler about this a couple months ago, and this is actually false! Despite Google's Chrome/Security teams planning to penalize sites with fake download buttons in early 2016 (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/googl...), a Google employee actually confirmed for me that they weren't against the Ads team's policies, which is why they were still prevalent on sites with Google Ads this past year.

Which presumably means one division of Google could make money on a fake download button ad while another division of Google was penalizing a website for displaying it.

The employee in question said he was going to bring up the concern internally and try to get the policy changed, but I haven't heard anything since.